The Path of the Savior
by Flatlander
Summary: The direct sequel to my other fanfic, "The New Savior." Cameron "Connor" begins the human Resistance after John's death. Each chapter has a JohnxCam flashback, and exploration of Cam's character. Read and review please, and enjoy! Latest chap: July 17
1. The Path of the Savior

**Disclaimer: I do not own TSCC. Goddamn it do you need to keep asking me that?**

**Note: This is the direct sequel to "The New Savior," my other fanfic about TSCC. It takes place after the end of that story, still in NORAD COC and with Cameron _Connor_ as the new savior of mankind. The item below is not the story itself, but the opening. The story chapters come soon. **

* * *

**THE PATH OF THE SAVIOR**

**Flatlander**

_The storm that came, the storm that left  
__Humanity in shambles__  
By fire sprouts as mushrooms grow  
With little to no preamble,_

_Did break our lives, our families__  
And sent us all to 'blivion__  
Then rose from ashes, evil phoenix  
Who bore a heart of silicon._

_Then came she from the metal house  
A placid stronghold thus  
And called all men and women left  
To mount the last Resistance._

_While she was so young to our eyes  
__A Venus in her beauty,  
__Her strength and honor realized  
The hope of human victory._

_Yet while her fist and steely wrath  
__Were sent only to enemy,  
__She was not 'mong the ranks of men  
She was not in humanity._

_For in the war of solitude  
__Where men fought cold, unfeeling hearts  
__Blessed steel 'gainst cursed steel  
Composed the war of leaders' arts._

_The mind of the sky and the leader of man  
__Bore cores of close affinity  
__Yet one sought to destroy mankind  
While the other loved its dignity._

_So she was strong, and she was good  
__Despite her origin  
__She chose to live for man alone  
Not for her soulless kin._

_And this is why the one who saved  
__Us all from termination  
__Was entered to acceptance by  
Her lawf'ly fearful nation._

_For choose she did, the righteous path  
__A glorious endeavor:  
__The drive to save the human race  
The path of the savior._

-Edmundson, R. _Iter Salvator (The Path of the Savior), _2049

**For Cameron Connor. You shall never be forgotten.**


	2. The Rise of the Savior

**So after a certain amount of waiting time, at last! This chapter took a while to write because of school and because of C&C3: Kane's Wrath, which I enjoyed to some degree. **

**Special thanks to Trigger-Happy03 ****for beta-ing the first half of this chapter! You pointed out quite a few problems on my part. Thanks! :D I didn't bother to show you the second half since it didn't need much in the way of checking, considering the subject matter.**

**I hope the readers of The New Savior won't be disappointed. I liked the premise of Cameron as Resistance-leader, but honestly? I wasn't really intending to write anything about it! I had to outline the rest of the story from that point, since I didn't have many ideas about it, and had to redo many parts of this chapter several times over simply because of possible difficulties in maintaining continuity later on.**

**Regardless, may you all enjoy this bit. I know I did, writing it! This is...**

* * *

**The Rise of the Savior**

"Connor" couldn't have been more than sixteen years old by the reckonings of Peter O'Reilly. As the huge blast doors swung open, the youngish face, smallish body frame and late-teens style of apparel revealed themselves to him as the turkey did to the late John four years ago. She was very pretty; long, flowing brown hair and luscious chocolate eyes rounded off an overall well-made face.

What betrayed this image of a normal, young, possibly rebellious but otherwise harmless adolescent was clearly the H&K MG4 that she held raised at him through the widening crack in the blast doors. Her hands were very steady, he observed, and she showed no signs of being frightened or uneasy about the situation. Yet what most struck him about the girl/woman before him were her eyes – if she really was as young as she appeared, how could she have possessed the eyes that belonged to those who had seen Death, or were its employees? Sure, they were _beautiful_, all right, but they still looked like their glare could kill a man at fifty paces.

"Name," Connor said as she walked towards O'Reilly. Her movements were strong and balanced; there was no indication that she was at all disturbed by the nuclear detonations that had occurred earlier.

"Master Sergeant Peter Jameson O'Reilly." He handed his ID to her, keeping his hand free of the rifle he had on his shoulder.

"How did you get here?" Connor asked, her gun still locked in position – pointed at him very nicely.

"Drove an Abrams tank out of Fort Carson. I was holed up in the underground when the unmanned ground vehicles popped up. I got the radio message from Nellis around that time. Since Cheyenne Mountain's just a few miles up the road, I figured I'd take my chances here."

Strangely, Connor did not look at his identification. Instead, her eyes traced up and down his body, looking intently at him like she was scanning him or something. It made him feel a little uneasy. After this interval of eye-sweeping, she lowered her gun and let it hang from her shoulder. She leaned to a side, checking behind him. "You didn't encounter resistance on your way here?"

"No," O'Reilly shook his head. "The UGV's looked like they were on patrol. I waited for them to leave, then I dashed for the tank and got here."

"The nuclear strikes?"

"They were far off. One of them splashed the Ray Nixon plant and cut the power."

"What about resistance _in _the tunnel?"

"I didn't see anybody on my way in…"

Connor then turned and walked away. "Go inside." He did, as she closed the blast doors again.

As O'Reilly followed Connor into the complex, he took note of its utter emptiness. This girl was running the place by herself, all the communications and control systems and everything. Looks like she wasn't some normal teen after all; she had something up her sleeve that suggested a lot more power than her image proposed.

"Connor, right?" O'Reilly said as he walked behind her.

"Yes," she responded blankly.

"Do you have a first name?" he asked her.

"Cameron," she replied simply.

"Cameron," O'Reilly repeated. "What's your story?"

She looked back at him with a puzzled look on her face. "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

"What?" O'Reilly scratched his head a bit.

"You asked me what my story was."

O'Reilly laughed. "Okay. I meant, how'd you get into NORAD command and all? Were you supposed to be up at Crystal Peak?"

"Oh. Thank you for explaining." Connor seemed to consider the question for a while. "You'll learn it along with everyone else when they get here."

* * *

She couldn't mourn. Not yet, at least; either the program had not been written yet, or her first time in experiencing such circumstances would serve as her benchmark for triggering mournful behavior later on. Therefore, being capable of neither weeping nor moping over the body of her dead objective, Cameron Connor simply stored John's body somewhere out of the way, and continued to speak with the various pockets of survivors scattered about the country. That had been about an hour prior to the coming of this Peter Jameson O'Reilly.

She had scanned the new arrival. Unless Skynet made their endoskeletons out of calcium phosphate (bone) now, he was flesh-and-blood human – which was a good thing. Percentage chance of a human being working for Skynet was too low even for the slightest consideration; the topic was shifted to the bottom of the heuristic pile.

She led him into the control room, from where she would, like the conductor of some grand orchestra, direct the flow of this entire Resistance. She understood that due to her appearance, there would be…_resistance_ to her Resistance. As she would make her skills known to them, however – though not yet in the physical and knowledgeable sense – they would learn to respect her. It was a key component in human hierarchical structures; outranking someone by proving yourself superior to him or her through your prowess in fields that matter is the only foolproof way to earn their respect. You can't just walk into NORAD COC, pick up the mike and say, "I'm in charge" without showing what you had. Not even John Connor could do that – the original plan was for Cameron to teach him important tactics usable against Skynet. That would have made him a feasible and effective leader for Tech-Com military.

Speaking of John Connor, the Savior-who-was-supposed-to-be now lay in a shiny black bodybag, laid neatly to rest at the stage that was set-up for live television addresses by the President of the United States. While both he and the President were dead, at least there was a body to speak of in John's case; the African-American man who led the so-called "Free World" was vaporized by a T-X's plasma cannon when she, along with her T-888 friends, burst into Crystal Peak with the intent to kill. John merely slept beyond the flow of time.

Cameron's thought processes were getting jumbled up. Now, like all computers based on solid-state memory, she did not need defragmentation cycles – a chore suited for spinning magnetic platters with terrible random read rates. However, because her evolving neural network was beginning to stack memories on top of memories in the associative patterns characteristic of memory engrams within the human brain, as opposed to the systematic categorization of other Terminator systems – in essence, because she was becoming more and more human in thinking – she found it efficient to process each arising memory and check if their memory attachments were valid, before unloading them from RAM and filing them back to storage.

As she considered all this, one of the memories in question surfaced and she took the time to look it up…

* * *

John Connor looked out the window and it was raining. A rarity during the hot summer days, he took time out of his homework to just immerse himself in the indistinct white noise of countless raindrops hitting the ground. It was a placid experience, like being by the sea, where the rush of the waves and their subsequent collapse on the shore could be heard well.

It wasn't just the noise in which he was able to immerse himself, however; Cameron was standing outside in the rain, her face turned to the sky and her eyes closed. The rain was hard enough that she was soaked now, her hair bonding to form a single dripping mass spread about her body.

John looked on at this. Had it been any other person, even a stranger, he'd not have found this weird at all. It was actually quite soothing to feel the rain pelt against your body, when you didn't have to worry about falling ill or having to clean your house floor when you step back inside all wet and muddy. This, however, was Cameron. Cameron the killing machine who didn't quite possess humanity, but merely a reasonable facsimile thereof.

He stepped outside into the rain, and shivered at the sudden wave of cold that was a lot more Arctic than what the shower could offer. He walked to Cameron, who didn't seem to notice him, and stood by her side.

"Hey, Cam," he went. She opened her eyes at this and turned to him.

"You should go back inside," she said. "While there's little correlation between catching a cold and being in the rain, you'll still be freezing if you stay here longer."

"Yeah, I'll keep that in mind," he said. "What are you doing?"

"I'm standing in the rain."

"I think I got that bit. I mean, why are you doing it?"

"I'm calibrating my bodily tactile sensor network," she proceeded mechanically. "The relatively arbitrary and asymmetrical impacts of the rain on my body allow me to localize sensory input to appropriate locations."

"Couldn't you have done this in the shower?"

"I like the rain better."

John blinked. "You _like_ the rain better?" He repeated what she said, but with replaced emphasis.

"Yes." She tilted her head to one side while looking at him. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No," he said. But in his head, something probably was. "Why do you like it better?"

She looked at him with those lovely, brown, but basically _blank _eyes. "I don't know. I just do."

John didn't know either, and he couldn't even think of a reason as to why this development would take place. Since when did robots like her take preference to anything without efficiency or situational suitability as a reason? That was a feature most aptly reserved for humans with emotions and various neurological quirks that inexplicably made them do this and do that, outside of any logical thinking on the matter.

Or maybe that was just humanistic complacency. After all, "emergence" as described in chaos theory could easily apply to the "most advanced learning machine on the planet." Maybe the extremely complexity of her "mind" was beginning to form things that weren't originally intended for her…

He looked back at her. "Why don't you come back inside?"

She nodded. "The calibration process was complete fifteen minutes ago."

"Then why were you still standing in the rain?"

"It feels good."

John sighed and walked with her back inside the house. Cameron seemed to be a TV addict, so after wiping herself down with a towel, she stood in front of the tube and flipped it on. "2008 Beijing Olympics," she said, then sat down on the sofa and watched the commercial from 2007. The Olympics were about a year away.

* * *

Cameron would have proceeded further with this train of thought had O'Reilly's voice not piped in, followed by the sound of something unzipping. She tagged the memory with the correct attributions, deconstructed it and filed it back into storage, then turned to see him peering into the bodybag at the stage.

O'Reilly looked into the face of the dead man. He must have been in his early twenties or so. The body had not gone sour yet, so he must have died recently. "Who's this?" he asked.

"That's John Connor," she said, walking over. She zipped it back up.

"John…Connor?" he said. "Was he your brother?" O'Reilly didn't think Cameron looked old enough for the other possibility.

"Yes, he was my brother." Then she paused for a while, and added, "He was also my husband."

"Husband." So she _was _old enough for that. "I'm sorry," he said after his own pause.

"He died a good death," she said, lying. Getting shot in the back while nearing safety from everything was not a particularly good death. Then again, it wasn't quite a lie. He had said all that he needed to say as he lay dying with Cameron by his side. Had he remained alive to run the Anti-Skynet Brigade, the words that escaped his mouth with his last breaths may have otherwise forever been retained within him.

"How long were you two together?" he asked.

She was about to give the very precise answer of thirty-seven seconds, derived from the time he requested that her name be changed, to the total cessation of neural activity in his brain. But that was stupid.

"Six years," she said. "I married young."

They were interrupted by a crackle of static over the radio. "That's your cue, I guess," said O'Reilly.

She left the body of John again – a brief memory of her leaving his body after he'd died surfaced among her thought processes – and went to the radio. "This is Connor," she spoke.

"We've arrived just outside the North Portal. Someone parked an M1 tank outside. Do we have company?"

"MSG Peter Jameson O'Reilly. He came down from Fort Carson about twenty minutes ago." Cameron had decided to start rounding vocal time requests to increments of five minutes. It definitely made her sound more human.

"Army fellow. Good to hear. Are we clear for entry?"

"How many are you?"

"I got myself, of course, and seven in the backseats."

"Leave the vehicle outside the tunnel."

* * *

Like all Terminators, Cameron did not actually have a HUD. She _did_ have an archaic video output that included a human-readable HUD overlay, which would have been used for maintenance by humans – if there were indeed humans who wanted to maintain the architects of their destruction. Regardless, her machine vision was actually composed of pertinent information integrated _directly_ with the visual data that she received, as opposed to any form of obtrusive and distractingly overlain elements. It was really an elegant system, interweaved with an elegant mind that could truly appreciate and fully use this form of understanding the world around her.

After engaging the rather crude door-opening mechanisms, she looked straight at the massive blast doors, feeling around for the door crack and putting her face close to it. Making sure that O'Reilly couldn't see her, she lit up the electromagnetic emitters on her optical sensors. To any naked-eye observer, it would appear that her eyes were glowing blue, but with the correct equipment, one would see that she was emitting photons oscillating at all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. Since her optical sensors were actually capable of detecting everything from gamma to radio waves, this active photon scanning method would prove effective at determining just what was exactly on the outside of the door.

She registered eight X-ray reflections from the opposite end of the door, along with their respective infrared signatures. The processes flowing about in her CPU, referred to in aggregate as her "mind," prioritized the new visual data entering her system and made sure that these eight newcomers were all human. And they were.

Cameron decided against the silly machine gun routine and presented herself before the blast door as it went on its distinguishingly _slow_ path to opening. As soon as space allowed, three men came running in with their fully SOPMODded M4A1 carbines drawn, having come in a line as though they were stacked against the door in efficient special-forces fashion. When they found only O'Reilly and Cameron, both unarmed, they called out through the blast doors for the rest of the team to come through.

Four more armed men moved carefully in, doing a second check for sanity's sake, before the last one came in striding, tall and authoritative in his appearance in brownish MARPAT.

"Stand down," he said in a gruff voice. His seven companions did as told. He then turned to Cameron. Her voice had sounded rather age-neutral over the radio, but he'd never expected her to seem so young. As O'Reilly had estimated on his own first sighting of Cameron, he gauged her to look, say, sixteen. At about five feet and six inches in height, she wasn't that tall to him either. "Connor?" he went on to ask.

"Yes," Cameron said. "I'm Cameron Connor." She was now tweaking her voice modulation, mildly deepening it and adding the slightest hint of an accent. Her experience with military commanders showed her a pattern in what was deemed an "authoritative voice," and she was modifying her own to project the necessary image.

"Good to see you," he said, offering his hand. "Captain Jackson Edwards, USSOCOM." He was surprised by the strength of grip she returned. "Pardon the book-cover analysis, but you don't seem to be…military."

"Do you have the frequencies?" she asked, apparently ignoring the question.

"Got them right here," Edwards said, pulling out a small black book from his breast pocket. He handed it to Cameron. "About my earlier q-"

"Listen in to what I'm going to say," Cameron interrupted. "It will tell you all you need to know. Bring your men in." She went on to activate the door closure mechanisms again. This was becoming something of a routine to her now.

"Yes, _ma'am_," Edwards responded with skepticism in his voice. _Well, that was fast._

* * *

The party of nine went in front of a row of radio equipment. "O'Reilly," Cameron called. "Set those radios to these frequencies." She gave him the black book and pointed to six sets of numbers on a page. O'Reilly did this after a little head-scratching concerning the rather _ancient_ technology with which he was tasked. All the knobs and dials and vacuum tubes were very much resistant to EMP (which was the intention), but were hardly user-friendly for a 21st-century newcomer.

Cameron then gathered a number of old input wires and connected each to a loose microphone. The wiring wasn't pleasant to look at, with insulated scratched off and bits of plastic hanging, but it did the trick. She flipped each radio on, then sat down, all her microphones in front of her and pointed at her. Edwards and his men were looking intently at her seated form, waiting for her first broadcast to the ragged remains of North American humanity – the only Resistance that she could scrounge up _for now_. O'Reilly walked over and patched the audio through local speakers, as he began tuning the radios.

A flurry of static was followed by a flurry of words. There was chaos about now as Skynet's ground and air forces, following its nuclear strikes, were finally being deployed. FQ-45 UCAVs, T-1 robot tanks, and any other unmanned combat units that it could find were activating across the nation, fueled by the raw commands of Skynet's war on mankind.

_This is Maryland National Guard, we are under attack from local ground forces-_

_Jefferson, stand your ground! Reinforcements are on the-_

…_four-eight this is Whiskey two-seven, fire mission on grid zero-three-eight-seven- shit! _

_Get to the chopper! We can cover our ground troops if we-_

_Oh my God oh my God oh my God- _get your asses in order! _We're not here to whine about—_

Incoming ballistic missile _I know, damn it! _Aegis radar detects incoming ballistic missile _Shut that damn thing off!_

Each sweep of the radio's knob brought a new story to the ears of all present. Skynet had not only superior forces, it had superior organization. Every man, woman and child heard in radio chatter was a small part of a ragtag "militia" that couldn't even properly deserve the term, what with their objective being simply to stay alive for a few more minutes. Some of the fighters didn't even know what was happening; the common theory amongst the ignorant and unknowledgeable was that some nuclear-capable country had taken out major military and civilian centers across the United States, and then moved in unmanned units to serve as the initial offensive wave. Provocation was unknown, motives were unknown, and even _identity_ of the attackers was unknown. All they wanted to do was survive.

They weren't doing very well. Disorganized groups heard on chatter would last a few more hours, tops, as they collapsed under the pressure of attackers whose coordination was inhumanly precise. Weapons stockpiling was difficult, since the invading army could only really be harmed by antitank weaponry – which was hard to muster given the surprise nature of the assault. It wasn't even a war anymore in some parts; it was simply _genocide_. To fight was to die – which led some people, disillusioned by the futility of resistance, to kill themselves. Some broadcast these intentions over the radio, and one even did it while broadcasting, the report of a pistol to his head resonating within the minds of all the biological listeners in the room. Cpt. Edwards, always the hotshot military commander, had even grimaced at the sound that represented a senseless death.

None of these, however, affected Cameron. She valued human life – on occasion, there were humans whose lives she valued more than her own. But on the battlefield, even with her concepts of morality, she knew that there were those who could not be saved. No one was really expendable, but many were beyond rescue, and many more were already dead – meat and bones, not life. This is why she was completely unaffected by the audible hardships of the unorganized, and why her attention was only really taken when O'Reilly hit the correct frequencies.

There was comparatively little noise now, as each radio was tuned to the frequencies suggested in the black book given to Cameron by Jackson Edwards. One could hear the indistinct bustling of soldiers and survivors, instead of the screams of the fallen. People were scared, of course, but not panicking, and more importantly _not disorganized._

Cameron leaned over to speak into the microphone. She hesitated for a fraction of a second, pondering a lie to tell that would be an effective _hook_ for all the lost fish in the raging sea of war and blood. With her old emotional response program active again – as she felt that John would have wanted – she was as frightened as they are. She didn't show it, of course. As the future master of the Resistance was to be the pillar of human strength, she, with her lack of humanity, would need to work for a few more extra effort points to make her mark and be respected. Perhaps they'd know her true nature in the near future; perhaps when she would be killed by some opportunistic plasma blast; perhaps they'd never know. But for now, she was Cameron Connor, the principal leader of mankind, the hope of humanity. And then she knew what lie to tell.

"This is Cheyenne Mountain Combat Operations Center, broadcasting on 43.10, 49.70, 56.78, 61.00, 64.00, and 79.11." Suddenly, on all audio channels there was silence. Some whispers could be discerned over the speakers, but in general all were listening intently.

"Today is April 11, 2011. A few hours ago, the Skynet missile defense system was activated, and declared war on mankind, launching high-yield nuclear missiles to key military and civilian positions on nations across the globe.

"You all know, then, why this Resistance must be formed. You all know what you're doing, wherever you are, and why you're listening to this transmission. Maybe, though, you're wondering where I come in. Maybe you're wondering what I can offer to an organized Resistance. The answer is simple.

"My name is Cameron Connor, and among other things, I built Skynet."


	3. The Savior's Hands

**Author: At last! This chapter was intended to be very short but ended up being one of the longest single chapters that I've ever written! The writing is weaker than it normally is, but I compensated with depth and some form of intensity, I hope!**

**The John/Cam flashback is practically a oneshot fic by itself! I hope readers will take the time to sift through John's musings about Cameron. I had some more pretty complex ideas about her personality and stuff but I didn't have the patience to write them down! :( Hopefully I can expound later on**. **Anyway, it's not important to read the flashback, but below it is a short period of Cameron thinking about what had happened, and further technical details concerning her system.**

**If you are confused about my depiction of Skynet in any way, feel free to drop me a message and I'll try to explain the best I can. **

**Honestly? Special thanks to Summer Glau! She is such a great actress and portrayed Cameron so endearingly that her image was able to inspire me on the personality and development of Cameron. :D**

**Sorry if this has virtually no action in it; the next one will start off with some fighting. I feel a little tired myself of all the exposition. I should get to the MEAT of the Savior! :D**

**By the way, the structure of each chapter is such: An epigraph from the future, the storyline, and a John/Cam flashback somewhere in between. If I pull this off, it may very well become TWO fics in one!**

**So I hope you enjoy this chapter - and please review! I am kinda disappointed that I have received no constructive criticism as of yet, since I know my writing is bland but I don't know HOW and WHY it is! None of my fanfics have ever gotten CC! (cries)**

**Alas, reader, I take too much of your time. READ ON!**

* * *

"_Connor told us not to fear Skynet, for she was its mother, and she endeavored to effect a reprimand on the unruly child. It was powerful and merciless, and commanded an army of unfeeling machines, but she had the will of humanity, which no metal could break, and she had authority over the army of the righteous. In this comparison was Connor the champion, and the image of her as victorious savior inspired many of us even poised at the edge of expiration."_

_-Brig. Gen. (ret.) Emerson Lee, on Cameron Connor _

**The Savior's Hands**

April 17, 2011 came, and between this day and that one of Judgment had occurred the arrival of many new faces at Cheyenne Mountain. Cameron Connor's door-opening arm would never grow tired of the process of opening the blast doors, and neither would she ever accuse it of committing the sin of epitomizing utter tedium and repetitiveness, but her meatier compatriots decided to take the matter of security (and by association, door-opening) into their hands, so she was no longer encumbered with the act.

By now, sixty-seven people occupied the Operations Center, not including Cameron herself. These personnel's origins were spread out across the country, but all had been tightly enough integrated into the Post-Apocalyptic Radio Loop that they were able to hear news of the seeds of a unified Resistance being sown in the state of Colorado. This relatively small number of people who were capable of moving to Cheyenne Mountain did not exactly represent those who were _left_: Many from other states had chosen to remain in their own home bases and bunkers, and sent field runners out instead, while others were simply stragglers from nuclear strikes or robotic Skynet attacks who happened to have radios tuned in to the right frequencies. There were countless others out there who remained hidden or trapped, unable to move from their positions.

Now one would think that because of all the radio chatter, Skynet would _at least_ have caught on to something going on in NORAD's base. If it'd been listening in long enough, then it would know that representatives of pockets of organized resistance were accumulating on this very spot, and that the annihilation of the base would most likely delay the formation of any reasonable opposing force long enough for it to _terminate _them, and any feasible threat to its plans. The problem, however, was that Skynet did not have access to _any_ such analog radio equipment as of yet, and it would not do so for another few months, when it would start expanding its system.

And this, of course, Cameron Connor knew very well, so she did not hesitate in broadcasting mass unencrypted transmissions all over America, and attracting the remnants of the regional force to her aid. No contact with other countries or continents had been established yet, but it was presumed that Skynet's _strong_ influence was localized to America and Europe, whose unmanned fighting muscle was significant enough to be used by the AI to defeat human forces.

Of the sixty-seven who now populated the large installation, eleven were leaders or closely tied to leaders of fairly large groups of reasonable people who didn't want to die. Many of these people were no more than untrained civilians, huddling together in groups that moved as a unit in order to better protect themselves. Others were soldiers too shocked by the loss of their loved ones to become effective combatants; they weren't much more help than the above. A good number, though – and this is what mattered – were warriors with guns cradled in their arms and rage in their hearts – rage enough to fight a war against the unfeeling metal adversary. Now _these_ were the kind of people Cameron desired to unify under Tech-Com's banner.

She walked among the people who came after O'Reilly, and Edwards and his men. They were tired, clearly, from long Humvee journeys or from cutting difficult swathes through lines of steel that fought back. A man sat on a scattered 80's mainframe box holding his left arm, which was bleeding profusely, while waiting for another to finish preparing a fresh bandage. There was another who had limped in alone with puncture wounds and burns, triumphantly claiming to have walked about a hundred miles to the base, and then collapsed as he got inside; he was a corpse now, seated up against a wall, his head dropped. There really seemed to be a division between the bad or exhausted of condition and the "okay to go" in the room, for as one large section of the place was filled with groaning bodies or ones which were utterly silent, another had a few men chatting about loudly, exchanging stories about the past six days, reclining in office chairs and generally seeming very good about themselves.

As she came close to this part of the room, some of the men's eyes and heads began turning to her. She was the only "woman" in the whole complex, and she was an especially attractive example of the sex at that. To top things off, over time, she'd removed her wide, bug-eyed look and constant scowl from her face and replaced them with a substantially more pleasant default expression.

She sat down on a desk – making sure that its structural integrity could withstand the weight of her coltan frame – and looked around at each man's face, keeping it in storage for reference.

"You must be Connor, then," said one of them from across the room, breaking the verbal ignorance.

"Yes," she said.

"Specialist Jacob Cayman," he said. "They gave me the rank 'cause I got landmine sense."

"Like a dog."

"Yeah, just like a dog." Cayman would have no idea why, but that didn't sit very well with Cameron, who didn't like dogs for obvious reasons.

Another man spoke. "2nd Lieutenant Top Hat. Real name's Pelagius," he said, drawing some snickers, "But you can see why they don't call me that." Cameron laughed too, going along with the crowd, before her face returned quite abruptly to its earlier expressionless state. He seemed to wink.

"The lieutenant _looks _like he's got a way with you women, Connor," a bearded man said. "But he's really 29-Year Old Virgin with a gun in his pants he hasn't yet used." Top Hat rolled his eyes at the man, as more laughter was directed at him. "Truth be told, Peggy…" _That_ got on his nerves. "I don't think you got a chance with that Anderson chick. Hell, she probably thinks you fall under good old 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'"

Having gathered the necessary chuckling, he returned to Cameron. "Major Francisco Villanueva. I keep these sons of bitches in line, thank you very much." He pretended to bow as the men clapped in mock affirmation.

One by one, each of the remaining men introduced themselves. They had all manner of interesting backgrounds. One had been a farm boy whose family was taken out by a tornado, and enlisted in the Army later on for his own reasons. Another was an openly gay Marine Sergeant who had come under figurative fire when the aforementioned obsolete "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy had still been in effect. He was said to have personally thanked the African-American man who had led the so-called "Free World" when his campaign for the repeal of the homosexual-silencing mandate finally came to victorious fruition. There was also a noncombatant among them, a hunter whose foraging arsenal had happily included a big-game hunting rifle when he encountered a T-1 in the woods. The massive blast from his weapon wasn't strong enough to break the thing's _full_ armor, but the laws of fortune dictated that this man survive the day, and his bullet broke through a chink in the armor previously caused by a 20mm armor-piercer, and destroyed the CPU.

When all of them were done, Cameron nodded in affirmation. "I'm Cameron. You know my last name; it was broadcast around every thirty-five seconds over the radio."

"Do you have a rank? Are you military?" Cayman asked.

"I was in DARPA-CRS, Cyber Research Systems, but as a civilian researcher."

"About that," Villanueva put in. "You built Skynet."

"To be specific, I was the leader of the team who was in charge of developing and implementing the Skynet AI."

"How does it feel, then?" he asked her.

"What?" she said in questioning reply.

"Your computer thing went mad and killed millions. How does that feel?"

The savior of humanity could not possibly be an advocate of its greatest enemy. "I was against its activation. Skynet was showing signs of sentience, and a single thinking entity in charge of the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons was not a good idea." Actually, among Cameron's logical processes was the idea that it _was _a good idea, as long as the entity was kept under firm control by systems which could work as fast as it did. Of course, for the fast-in-CPU but bad-in-optimization humans, that meant drafting more AIs to watch over it, each of whom needed to be watched by even more AIs and so on. Suddenly she realized why it _wasn't_ a good idea.

She continued: "The team voted against my wishes, though. And they also wanted it to have control over local unmanned forces, aerial and ground. Not tight." Why did she say "tight?" That was legacy vocabulary; must have been at least two years old.

"Damn right it ain't tight," Top Hat said. "I nearly lost my sister when the UCAVs started strafing. Fuckin' stroke of luck that I got her to Villanueva's band."

"Where'd you learn how to shoot big guns?" Cayman went.

"The combat personnel in DARPA. I have many friends."

"I'm sure you do," Villanueva said. "What're your plans for now?"

"I'll be assigning my generals. I'm looking for the leaders of resistance cells or their contacts. You're one of them, Major."

Villanueva nodded. "Anyone else in mind?"

"Some of the other leaders have been gathering in the dining area. I'll look among them." She stood up from her desk as she became aware of an error in her calculations – the desk had been creaking and snapping for the past minute. "I have something to do. I'll be in the bunks."

* * *

As she left, there wasn't that much discussion among the men about meeting Connor for the first time.

"She looked young," Cayman said. "I'd have said sixteen, but the dead guy in the mess hall freezer was her husband for six years, so I dunno how that works."

"My number was yours plus ten," Top Hat said. "That's a big forehead."

"I'd be telling you boys to shut up right about now," Villanueva offered, "but I say twenty." This median figure caused the other two men to murmur and nod.

"Anyone here totally creeped out by how stiff she was?" piped in the voice of a certain Sgt. Lancaster.

"I was," one said as he raised his hand.

"Same here," Top Hat agreed.

"Well," Villanueva interjected before the next man could concur. "To be fair to her, she did design a missile defense platform that decided to blow up the world, and then lost her husband in the process of running away from it, and now she's going off to rally the whole goddamn country to fight against flying and rolling metal hunks. _I'd_ be stiff."

While in the previous two topics of discussion there were those who shared varying views concerning Cameron Connor, in one matter there was a pretty general consensus:

"She's hot," said Sgt. Kessler, the tornado-traumatized former farm boy.

"Yeah," said half a dozen men almost in chorus.

"Definitely," Top Hat said with a nod and a sigh.

"Absolutely," Villanueva said.

"She is hot," went Sgt. Derringer, the openly homosexual Marine. "And this coming from me, that says a lot."

"You know, talking about her like that right now, in this situation? It's kinda off." Cayman just had to be the dissident. "I mean, she's basically gonna be our boss. On top of that, she just lost her husband. It sounds wrong."

"Nope," the rest of the room chorused again.

* * *

Cameron Connor returned to her quarters and considered her "mental" state with the Terminator equivalent of frustration. She supposed that this was what REM cycles and dream systems were purposed for in human beings – fixing jumbled-up heads and all. But she didn't have dreams, and she didn't sleep, so everything had to be done manually, including the said fixing up of jumbled-up heads. Why did she have to say "tight" back there? It wasn't an extremely inappropriate thing to say (although it was an outdated adjective which was too immature for her role), but it didn't come from her. At least, not from her active speech processing centers.

Her new associative method of storing memories and acting on mental processes was unique in that instead of allowing all her memories to be handled in a single registry or library of memories, each one was a self-contained executable with its own attributes and its own micro-registry of association tags. The advantages were that this made each memory very unique, and recalling one required at least vaguely knowing some details of related memories, which led to realistic behavior on her part, in that she didn't dissociate in-jokes and situations anymore, or forget why human bodies weren't called "bones and meat." The downside? Each executable had memory leaks like motherfucking Firefox 2. Leaky memories would bleed into concurrent memory segments, and when these segments were accessed by Cameron's CPU, she'd remember fragments from the leaks, and sometimes inadvertently act upon them too. In her earlier case, she said "tight."

The only way to fix this problem was to spend some time manually fixing her jumbled-up head. She closed her door, not locking it, and as she stripped herself of the clothes that she'd been wearing for the past three days, she entered a strange computational trance of mind-fixing purpose…

* * *

He found her in her room staring out the window again, which was something that she always did, and would have discarded the observation had he not seen – or thought he'd seen – a flicker of expression across her eyes. Perhaps it was an illusion, but then Cameron's whole existence revolved around projecting illusions for people, to the extent that maybe, for her, illusions were as real as it got.

John Connor walked in through the open door to get a better view. The golden light bathed her face and dressed the rims of its well-shaped silhouette with sharp linings of yellow. Spears of blond light played gently over her cheeks as the particulate they illuminated danced in front of her. John was suddenly overwhelmed by the resplendence of her…_construction_. And with this mental lexicology, yet again implicating her machine nature, the magic of Cameron's beauty was lost again. God, he hated it when that happened.

He went over behind her and tapped her back, to which she responded with a turn of her head, her brown hair gracefully matting her shoulders. Lovely eyes that were endlessly alert but never weary gazed back at his own, and he felt a shiver come over him that reached down to his torso, and from there, the wave of cold went to a place which he would rather not have associated with the "girl" standing before him.

"Hey." John's greeting was simple, but that never changed. Cameron responded with a customary head-tilt. She never really said hello to John, Sarah or Derek, since whenever she was spoken to, it was for a "field trip" or for yet another task to accomplish, and no one really went up to her to make conversation. She didn't verbally respond either, since normally they'd announce their intentions right after a greeting.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Do you want me to run a local sensory diagnostic on myself, or do you mean emotionally?"

"Emotionally."

"I don't know. I also don't know if I really feel."

John sighed. As far as he could tell, what she displayed in the way of personality didn't match up quite to many definitions of feeling. Her infiltration subroutines probably built up a foundation of deception in emotions, and so whatever bits and pieces of humanity he saw in her were just her mirage-forming mechanisms working perfectly well. At least, that's what he told himself whenever she winked at him, or when she danced, or when she gave him a random smile; he self-promoted this depressing theory to stop the gears from turning in his head.

She was years ahead of "Hello, World" but the same underlying artificiality still applied. The happy textual greeting of some scrap of Python or Perl carried the optimism of its human programmer, contained within brevity that could inspire the Shakespearean Polonius's wit – and yet what of it was the hardware or software's own? It was only doing what the slave-driver told it to do, and if there was one thing programmers were good at, it was telling things what to do. That was the very basis of their vocation, and you could psychoanalyze the fuck out of this and say that programmers were lazy bastards whose only strong point was telling other things and people what to do. You could also say that all leaders are the same thing, though. And it takes a degree of perception to understand the mind-numbing lines of supposedly context-free grammar that burned the eyes more painfully than anything Shakespeare himself could've written.

John was a programmer at heart – though he sucked at academic Math, he excelled in numerical and nonverbal logic – and with this came an understanding of the "artificial" part in artificial intelligence. And _further along_ with this came the utterly stunning impression that Cameron had made on him when he first heard her talk _as a machine_ – not as a script-reading infiltrator who "wanted to make friends with the new weird kid," but as a Terminator trying to improvise in a human world. The reprogrammed Terminator who visited him last was smart enough, but it was very straight-to-the-point in its speech and acts, and sometimes that wasn't good enough. Or sometimes it just represented an incapacity to comprehend subtle nuances about interactions with humans or how people were supposed to speak. His type were infiltrators only in an aesthetic sense; they could speak in proper grammar, and they looked like people on the outside, but it wasn't just their endoskeletons that were stiff and cold – it was their thinking, too.

When John had asked Cameron (way back when they first met) if she was new, stating that she seemed "different," he was both trying to get her to ring off a list of just _how _she was different…and testing her. It was a solid question that, he knew, would make most machines emit a chunky comparison-and-contrast essay encompassing their models and the ones to which they were being compared and contrasted. He expected her to say something similar.

Instead, she took a chip from his bag, said, "I am," and walked away, eating the thing.

Normally, when laypersons play the "human" side of a Turing test, they look for problems in the computer; awkward statements, patterns of speech that sound just _off_, essentially thinking with basic concepts of their own behavior in mind, or how they understand the "average human being" to interact with them. In many cases, that needs voluminous discourse with the computer, and the Turing test may fail because of layperson testers who couldn't know any better. In contrast, even despite the technological gap he sustained from eight years' worth of temporal displacement, John Connor could tell a machine from a man in the span of a few lines of mere textual speech. It was the little nuances of human behavior, stuff that everyone took for granted, that really mattered. You could get a computer to defeat most Turing testers, and despite that it could still sound as though it suffered low-functioning autism.

Cameron _was _different. That very simple act of saying "I am" in response to the investigation of her differences, _and then demonstrating this difference_, just walking away knowing that she'd made her point – that showcased an intelligence greater than that of any machine he'd ever seen, even against the late Uncle Bob. It signified that she understood the value of action over description when it came to human beings, and understood it in a way that wasn't merely a programmed Post-it Note that said "humans like actions better than words" but indicated such discernment within her that was the essence of humanity. And it would've been so easy for anyone else to miss, too, who wasn't looking for humanity in the right places – where it was taken for granted.

The next time she surprised him, it was Sarah Connor who related her story. His mother had been telling him about how Cameron had nearly gone out and killed a policeman, and how she had tried to see where her control structure came from.

"I do. From John," Cameron had said in response to Sarah's question on whether she followed orders.

But when Sarah asked if she'd follow an order she'd give to John, she said, "Not this John."

Sarah had asked back, "Not this John. Aren't they the same?"

"Not yet," Cameron had replied.

John had known what that meant. It wasn't some one-step transformation from John Connor A to John Connor B – nothing as mundane or predictable as that. No, what Cameron had referred to was the fact that she would take orders from John Connor, when he became _John Connor_. This was not to transpire by a glorious transfiguration on a mountain before his disciples as did the one Jesus Christ, but in a slow evolution of his persona, in changes so intricate and small in their incidence, that it took humanistic perceptiveness that was _much deeper than normal_ to detect them, and see them for what they were: the changes that would lead to him becoming "the New Savior". And Cameron, for all the Terminator behavior that she exhibited, possessed this very perceptiveness, and it allowed her to see that the young John, who she now protected, was a very different person from the Resistance-fighting, machismo-laden older John who reprogrammed her and sent her back to accomplish the task of his protection.

It was the kind of stuff that would make others' brains leak out of their ears, but was also the stuff that fascinated John so much, and was what made Cameron so endearing and attractive to him. God _damn_ it, she was _different_.

"I don't know. I also don't know if I really feel."

"You probably do," John said. "You're different, Cameron. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise." Why was he being protective of her feelings? She didn't need that. Even if she _did_ have feelings, hurting them would make no difference. He sat on her bed. She followed and sat next to him, and the fact that she was so close to him, the way he felt her breath searing his neck and cheek, the way he felt her chocolate eyes gaze over him, were enough to make him feel that cold shiver again. He decided to quiet down his heart and his…"male-issue secondary crotch-brain" by putting an arm around her shoulder, and leaning her body against his.

He'd just wanted to hold her by himself, expecting her to mostly ignore his actions, but she rested her head on his shoulder, and hugged his side, drifting peacefully into their mutual embrace. John felt an incredible tingly feeling across his whole body, as his heart rate, blood pressure, and other pertinent vital signs skyrocketed. Each subtle move of Cameron's body, each barely discernible touch, caused him to shudder and throb within. It was actually enough to make her wince, since all this time she'd been monitoring his vitals.

"Are you all right? Does this make you nervous?" Cameron asked innocently.

"Yes and yes," John said. "I'm all right…and kinda nervous." He laughed in spite of himself. He knew her "humanity" well, but he also knew her quirky innocence, naiveté and curiosity. Even if he _were_ intimately hugging a truly _human_ person, she'd not feel the slightest offense at what he said. Instead, it would probably make her more curious- oh shit.

Thankfully, they didn't go any farther than that. For the next two or three minutes, John and Cameron embraced softly, soaked in beautiful yellow light that was streaming through the window. The sunlight warmed John's insides and saturated his senses so that he wanted to be locked in her arms forever; the fragrance of her hair and skin forced his breathing to heighten in pace and strength, making him gasp at times; her face, presently rested magnificently on his shoulder, was so peaceful with its closed eyes and pleased smile-

No. She couldn't have been smiling. _It's an illusion_, he thought to himself, but knew that he didn't want it to be. He knew that he wanted her to be happy in their moment together, that he wanted to please her with his company, and not just be her "objective." Being her objective made him the focus of her life, but it connoted more of slavery to goal-based programming rather than free will, which he was _so sure_ that she possessed. He could almost trick himself that she wanted to be with him and protect him, rather than her simply having been ordered to do so.

He'd turned away from her face, and when he looked again, he saw the smile still there. It burned his eyes; Cameron was a beautiful creature without trying, but when she smiled, it was a different experience altogether. When he witnessed her winsome beam, the spray of a neighbor's sprinklers became so much clearer and somehow appealing, and the colors of the world were so much more vibrant and iridescent, and the sounds of the wind and the swaying of trees became so perfectly in tune with each other that they were like some euphonic orchestration of nature, weaving a sonorous tapestry of perfect harmonic resonance, all of which only served to further his feelings for her, and fueled his longing for even the slightest hint that she shared his feelings.

His embrace loosened as he had to ask, "How do you feel?" Her head propped up to face his.

"This is **tight**." (memory leak resolved!) Cameron always said that when she figured that something was supposed to please her.

He laughed. "I mean, emotionally."

"I don't think I feel," she said again.

"Not even bad things?"

"No."

"Sometimes, Cameron…" He groped in mental darkness for mental straws. "I wish you felt sorrow, and sadness and loneliness."

"Those are all negative emotions. Why would you want me to experience them?"

"So that I could comfort you when you felt them."

"Oh. Okay." Her head drifted back down to his shoulder, and he was warm again. He embraced her tight and they held each other until his mom arrived…almost half an hour later.

* * *

It was in sharp contrast to the clamor of the more densely-populated parts of the base, that the living quarters were virtually silent. Thick steel walls made distant the noises of the control room and mess hall, and any sound within was enhanced by its strong echo through the wide corridors of the place.

Each of Master Sergeant Peter Jameson O'Reilly's footsteps was subject to these echoes, and every footfall was a blade of disturbance through the placid silence of the halls. He was almost embarrassed, somehow, because in any other such place, at any other such time, there'd have been someone groaning at having been woken up, and maybe he'd get a taste of some verbal abuse.

Well, this _wasn't_ any other place, and there certainly wasn't any other time like the post-apocalyptic future. Six days after all hell was unleashed on the planet, it's doubtful that sleep could be so easily had and so vehemently defended.

His job was to get Connor. She'd left the control room with the soldiers about forty-five minutes ago, and the top leaders had already gathered in the VIP conference room in the lower levels. They'd just been waiting for her, and after such waiting had led to more waiting and even more impatience – time wasn't money anymore; time was_ LIFE! _– O'Reilly was asked to go get her. He was nearing her door now, and he took mental reference as to its number so that he wouldn't get lost again looking for the "one with pink nail polish streaked on the left side."

She'd assigned herself a relatively small room among the many available ones, saying that she didn't need much space. This was probably true, given the size of the woman; however, she seemed to bear a fashion sense that she _used_ even despite the nuclear holocaust, and that probably meant an aching need for clothes.

Or did it? Did it mean an aching need for clothes? This question was answered very, very abruptly when O'Reilly knocked on her door and found that it swung open easily. "Cameron – I mean, Connor?" he called out. She'd not locked it, so she probably was on her way out, or didn't need any privacy – at least, this was what went on in O'Reilly's head, and it was unfortunate when the answer was neither, because the first sight he saw was Cameron Connor, absolutely naked, sitting on her bed.

"Co- Jesus Christ!" he screamed as he slammed the door. Really, really hard. The blast of sound made his ears burn and ring.

Inside, Connor, who'd been staring rather blankly into space for quite a while now, came to. She looked around, and there were a few things strange about her room. One, there was a loud echo of some kind resonating throughout the immediate vicinity. Also, her door was stuck more deeply into the threshold than it had been before. She looked out the eyepiece in the door and saw the surprised face of O'Reilly to a side. Gloriously oblivious to her current appearance, she opened her door and peered outside.

O'Reilly saw her very clearly.

"Yes?" Connor asked of the man, whose eyes didn't meet her own, but were spotting a location considerably _south_.

"I- uh." He pointed to where his eyes were fixed. "You might want to put those back in the holster. Among other things."

She regarded the man's face with a furrowed brow, but at last she understood. "Oh." She went inside, closed her door, and a few seconds later, emerged in her underwear.

"Much…better. Not to say that the earlier view was unappealing, but…" O'Reilly fumbled for words. It was funny to watch, but Connor didn't laugh. "You know what? I think I'll shut up."

"Okay." Connor stepped outside a bit to look around. There wasn't anyone there. "What do you need?"

"The leaders. They've gathered in the VIP conference room in the NCC." The NORAD Command Center was intended to be the center of all NORAD operations and activity within Cheyenne Mountain.

"Okay. I'll dress up. Stay there." He was about to say yes when the door closed on him. _Okay. I'll just sit here then._

* * *

Cameron had spent more time on the memory than she should have. It was supposed to stop the moment she isolated where "tight" had come from, but she went on, listening in to what John said about him wanting to be able to comfort her when she was down, and looking on in full detail how they embraced for 26 minutes and 32 seconds. It was a very uneventful period of time, with conversation sparse and John repetitively stroking her hair, but Cameron's curiosity was piqued regardless. She restored each precise detail of his arms around her to main memory, so that her access time on them was lower, and she could better process them.

This was all very interesting to Cameron because at the time, she realized her Auxiliary Objectives list had suddenly been filled with branching requisite actions from her Primary Objective of "Protect John Connor," and she had responded in kind to his touches and embrace. Now Auxiliary Objectives were such little, everyday things like "wash the dishes" or "put your clothes on." They came and went as they pleased, separate from her machine consciousness, but at least they were always logical.

But she'd never seen anything like this before; in this case, they seemed to come from a new set of subroutines that were so low-level, she would never have become aware of them if they'd never surfaced. She ran a self-debug and traced the code fragments to bits and pieces of emotional programming which she'd been experimenting with, to aid her in infiltration. What had happened was that these separated pieces of programming had been autonomously generating responses at an extremely fundamental level, overriding many aspects of their higher-level counterparts. Basically, when John had embraced Cameron, these programs spawned an Auxiliary Objective that made her reciprocate, and they had never run through logic.

These things surprised Cameron; she knew that she was evolving somehow because of her advanced CPU's capacity for learning and abstract pattern recognition, but she never knew that as early as 2007, she was already beginning to feel things like that. It was too bad that O'Reilly interrupted her thought processes; perhaps more information laid just a few minutes further into the future.

And just as she was about to close her thinking session on the topic of that memory, suddenly she became aware of something surfacing among her primary goals:

**PROTECT JOHN CONNOR.**

That was impossible. She'd marked the objective as "failed" when he died six days ago. And yet here it was arising again, triggered by a nice memory of the boy.

Every time she thought of something now, she'd be arranging association tags in her memories again. It was inefficient since so much time had already been spent on fixing herself, and here she was jumbling up her head again. She decided to close the matter, to be saved for another, less restrictive time period.

Connor came out of the room fully dressed in some businesslike attire – _whew_, O'Reilly thought onomatopoeically – and she was ready to go.

"Let's go," she said for O'Reilly's sake, and they walked to the NCC.

* * *

When they arrived, eleven men in varying types of attire – from full combat uniform to officers' coats – sat in a glass-walled room around a large table. They'd been chattering about themselves when Connor came into view, and they immediately stood up as she and O'Reilly entered.

"At ease," she said. "I don't have the rank to say that to officers, but it's suggested that you do not use any militaristic honorifics in my context. Skynet is programmed to track the chain of command." As she sat down, they all did, except O'Reilly, who started off for the door. Connor, however, interrupted him.

"O'Reilly, you're with me," she said without looking at him. She pulled out a seat next to her, for him, which he took with some confusion. "I don't understand, I'm not one of-"

"You'll have a role to play."

"Okay."

"Gentlemen. Please state your names and your region of influence." Connor looked at the men seated before her. The men began speaking, beginning with Edwards and going counterclockwise.

"Captain Jackson Edwards, USSOCOM, 75th Ranger Regiment. I work under Major Kelly Grant who holds Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. As you can see, there's an interplay of command structure between the Air Force and the Army now."

"That's reasonable," Connor said. "Higher-level officers should have been killed by tactical nuclear strikes. Why's Luke Air Force Base intact, though? I'd think that it's big enough for Skynet to hit."

"I never said it was intact," Edwards replied grimly. "Large section was hit by a B61 nuclear gravity bomb the day after the missiles fell. A pair of unmanned BQ-2 Spirits flew over and nuked half the place to hell. We were able to shoot one down before it could drop its load, but the other went sailing by. At least the bomb's retardation parachute let most of us escape before we were caught in the blast." Ironically, the B61 thermonuclear bomb was originally known as the **TX-**61.

"Thank you for explaining. Please give me Major Grant's base frequency after this meeting."

The next in line was Villanueva.

"Major Francisco Villanueva. I keep Rio Rancho City in New Mexico. It's practically the only city in the whole state that wasn't more than three-quarters percent destroyed."

"You hold a city?"

"Yes. We also hold Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque. That place wasn't touched at all despite it being fucking huge, and despite most of Albuquerque itself being ashes."

"For very good reason," Connor said. "Kirtland AFB carries the world's largest nuclear weapons storage facility. Skynet will want some."

"And we're not letting it get any, yeah?"

"Precisely. Who's in charge there right now?"

"My second, 2LT AliciaNuñez. She's capable."

"Good. We'll need to reinforce Kirtland later on if Skynet attacks." Connor swept her eyes across the room, looking among the remaining nine.

"Colonel Julian Schmitz, Indiana Army National Guard. I'm under Major General Martin Umbarger, who leads the pack."

"Indiana? How did you get here so fast? Your state did not receive the radio signals until three days ago."

Schmitz laughed. "Ever wonder who the Bugatti Veyron outside belongs to?" Some eyebrows were raised at this. "Okay," he said in concession. "It's not mine, but we had to get _some_ fast transportation, and no one wanted to take the Blackhawk since the UCAVs fly really fast."

"I understand." She nodded.

The rest of the men led large groups with, sadly, no definite regional control, since they probably ended up with T-1 tanks in their faces. They hosted strong-willed groups, however, and they were at least well-stocked for now. This was good so far.

* * *

One of Cameron's intents when she asked for the regional details of each of the leaders in the room was that she wanted to know the extent of the nuclear damage that Skynet had dealt. Cameron had knowledge of what silos and methods were going to be used by the computer system to attack the world, and with time running out, she and John had replaced their focus on destroying Skynet with disabling its control systems. In the months leading up to Judgment Day, they'd been quite busy. John wrote a virus that attacked the satellite networks which linked the military to its offshore nuclear submarines. Cameron went state to state manually disabling land-based launch-capable nuclear facilities and destroying control structures pertinent to nationwide access.

In the end, come their iteration of Judgment Day, Skynet's off-the-shelf nuclear capacity was reduced by almost 60 percent compared to the original. Because it now had to choose its targets carefully, Skynet went from random genocide to targeting key population and military centers across the globe, to maximize efficiency and reduce the chances of success for enemy resistance. The problem was, it also had to avoid other nuclear facilities so that it could preserve them for later reclamation; this meant that _even more humans_ had to be left alive.

Another one of Skynet's problems was that this time around, it was designed as a distributed computer system, made specifically to spread to computers around the world in a way analogous to BOINC or Folding(at)home. Each internet-connected system would serve as a piece of its global brain, and also as an assistant to its surveillance system. This would have been conducive to its original purpose as a defensive system, but because it _just _had to go mad and wipe out humans, it also wiped out these systems. This meant that it had to centralize itself yet again, and with the United States offering computers both in volume and technological advancement – specifically of the room-temperature superconductor flavor – it chose its country of origin to settle. That meant that somewhere in the nation, Skynet was sitting on an electronic throne again.

With her plans in fruition, Cameron understood that she was making a more efficient Savior than John Connor was in her timeline. Among Future John's mistakes was not using any radio communication at all during the opening days of Judgment day, because he feared that Skynet would listen in; Cameron knew, though, that Skynet did not have any analog radio access until June 2011. Also, John's initial main focus was gathering people and staving off enemy attacks wherever they came; in essence, he was playing the role of defender at first, trying to take a stand wherever he had landed. He could not know that in the opening days of Judgment Day, Skynet was comparatively weak and carried only whatever UCAV's and UGV's were available at the time; Cameron used this knowledge to her advantage and led her people over the radio through spots where drone concentration was limited.

And perhaps the best part about her was that she was a robot from the future.

"I have knowledge on the inner workings of Skynet, and its current offensive and defensive capabilities – but that's not important right now. Do any of you have military or civilian research scientists among your people?" Some nodded and gave figures and personnel accounts.

"I'll be forming an R&D team out of them soon enough. Skynet was not the only thing DARPA-CRS was working on." Of course, by this, she meant that she was going to introduce future technology a little earlier than planned…perhaps twenty years earlier.

"Send out a call for more people to gather here. We need to stock CMOC with active standby personnel who are good for on-call missions."

"There are eleven of us," one of the leaders said. "Sort of makes us one short of the Apostles, eh?"

"One of the original twelve Apostles was a betrayer," Cameron said in response to that.

"Right," he said.

"O'Reilly, you're with me," Cameron repeated to the man beside her, who'd been generally quiet throughout the meeting. "You'll be my field runner and messenger. You do a good job of it."

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

"Call me Cameron."

"Okay," he nodded, not knowing why he'd be calling her by her first name.

"O'Reilly, about Fort Carson. You said no one's there?"

"There are patrols of UGVs there, but they're small. Otherwise, the base is empty."

"Good. We have a field trip. I need volunteers."


	4. The Strength of the Savior

**Author: Hello, readers! Sorry for the overtly exposition-filled previous chapter. I think I went overboard-paragraphs there. This one's action-packed for almost half of its length. This is also the longest chapter I've ever done, beating out the previous!**

**The little oneshot/flashback here is intentionally disjointed in the way it pops up right after the huge fight scenes. I wanted to show that Cameron doesn't really care a lot for her fighting, because she's basically built for that job. What she's _not _built for, like human leadership and stuff, is what really piques her interest.**

**The oneshot/flashback also continues what happened in the last chapter.**

**Can someone guess where her victory statement came from? Hint: Summer Glau **

**Military stuff is supposed to be technically sound. If any explanations are needed, post the questions in a review and I will PM! I PM all reviewers anyway**

**I hope you like this chapter! Coming up next is an update to "I Could Have Been More" and then continuation of this. Review please! :D**

* * *

"_She's a hardcore motherfucker."_

-_General Francisco Villanueva; on Cameron Connor_

**The Strength of the Savior**

"I lead, you follow." Cameron Connor's voice broke the silence that she and her seven-man team had been keeping.

"The fuck you are," one of hers, a PFC, said under his breath. His uniform had the tag "McGrady."

"I heard that." She did. "What do you mean?"

"With all due respect, of course," McGrady grumbled. "I think one of us should go first instead. No one knows what's in there."

"It's the lack of knowledge as to what lies behind the door that says I should go in first. I designed the T-1 and other unmanned ground vehicles that Skynet will be using. If anyone should know how to assault them, it's me."

"All right." Connor didn't know it, and the others didn't either, but McGrady had a big crush on her. This contempt that he seemed to show for her was partly him masking this crush, and also partly him not wanting to see her shot up.

Connor and McGrady were two members of a team that went on to include MSG Peter Jameson O'Reilly, Maj. Francisco Villanueva, Spc. Jake Cayman, 2nd LT. Top Hat, and Brookburne, the hunter – whose first name wasn't quite known. It had been hard enough fitting seven people into a Humvee, but to make matters even more complicated, the totaled weight of everyone seemed to massively slow down the vehicle. O'Reilly figured that Connor, who was the last to enter the car, was the straw that broke the camel's back, as the whole chassis fell and creaked when she entered. In reality, Connor was almost as heavy as _two_ of the men, and she wasn't quite a straw.

The team had moved from Cheyenne Mountain down to Fort Carson a day after the whole planning meeting. Connor's "field trip" involved going down to the emptied base and taking a lot of weapons and vehicles back home. Question: Morality and legality of stealing from the State? Well, now that no other "State" had been so badly damaged as the one which consisted of fifty United ones, there existed no government to stop them. Besides, it was for the salvation of mankind, which was as good a defense as any for a court-martial sometime in the future.

Now, bathed in the light of the 8:23 AM morning, they were standing at the large doors of a vehicle hangar. O'Reilly'd given the group a basic idea of what kind of equipment lay inside Fort Carson, and it was enough to pique Connor's interest and get her to go down there and maybe pick up some in the way of supplies. The problem was, of course, Skynet and its UGV's. They might've patrolled about the country in as-of-yet minimal numbers, but each was a strong sucker that needed some heavy firepower to bring down.

"Ready your M203's," she motioned to the squaddies who carried the 40mm underbarrel grenade launcher attachments on their M4 assault rifles. "AA-12s on standby," she said to those carrying the automatic shotguns loaded with Frag-12 shotgun grenades. Both weapons loaded high-explosive contact-detonation rounds that would be more than marginally effective against the likes of the T-1.

"Breaching." Connor fired standard buckshot from her own AA-12 to break the deadbolt and kicked the door down with impressive force; McGrady whistled at the strength of the woman. She ran in, jumping onto a crate and sweeping the entire room from side to side. It was pitch black.

"Can't see a damn thing," Villanueva said as he peeked inside. "You?" he asked Connor.

"No, I can't either," she said, but for some reason she maintained looking around as though her gaze could penetrate the darkness. She hopped off the crate, hitting the steel ground with a strange toughness, and walked into the sea of black.

"You gonna be okay, Connor?" Villanueva called out after her, but he didn't receive a response before powerful sodium lamps in the roof burned his darkness-adjusted eyes. Outside, the five onlookers thought that someone had tossed a flashbang, since the light was so abrupt. "Jesus!" Villanueva exclaimed, shielding his eyes from the light with his arm. "Might've given me some warning there, Connor."

"Sorry," Connor replied blankly. _She _didn't seem dazed at all. "Everyone inside."

The six shuffled in and checked corners for hidden opponents, but in the hangar there was nothing but Connor, them, and…a whole lot of stuff.

"People, we have MLRS!" Top Hat shouted as he ran over to a tracked vehicle that mounted a twelve-shot rocket launcher on its back.

"M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System," Connor recited. "Rocket artillery. This is useful." No shit. "Is it loaded?"

"Let's see." Top Hat went inside the vehicle and flicked the switch that raised the launcher on a pair of hydraulic staves. The launcher had two pods, which could hold a variety of rocket types, both guided and unguided. "The left pod has six rockets, looks like the unguided sort. The right pod has one big sucker in it. Can't say I've seen this one before."

"Let me see." Connor went over to inspect the "big sucker." The single missile encompassed an entire rocket pod which would otherwise fit six. "This is an ATACMS cluster missile." She inspected its markings. "This variant has fewer submunitions but longer range."

"Damn it, Connor, you've a field manual in your head or something?" McGrady asked.

"No. I don't sleep – _much_." Connor added the last word after some hesitation.

"Huh."

"Okay, three M1A2 Abrams tanks, and what _looks_ like an M1A1," Villanueva said after he'd checked each of the tanks. "The latter one doesn't have the thermal imager on the turret."

"Here's a Humvee," O'Reilly said. "And an M2 Bradley, too. No fuel, though."

"Shit, the tanks don't have fuel either," Villanueva observed in the fuel caps.

"There's a tanker of JP-8 in the base depot," O'Reilly said, referring to the JP-8 kerosene-derived fuel often used in tanks. "I know this well; I had to clean the insides once when my buzz cut went bad." That brought about a few snickers from the team. Actually, it wasn't that bad – the haircut itself had been proper. What had been problematic was the "MIDLER SUCKS BALLS" shaven on the back of O'Reilly's head by a very sneaky and mischievous Army barber. Brigadier General George Midler was not happy.

"I'll get the fuel truck," Cayman said, and started over for the hangar gate controls, which he opened. The steel gate began a slow process of opening. Connor was somehow reminded of the blast doors back in Cheyenne Mountain as Cayman walked out of the hangar.

"Hey, Lieutenant Top Hat," Brookburne called out. "I found the cache you described."

"Let's see it." Top Hat walked over to where the hunter was pointing. "MLRS rockets, all right. This is good."

"There is a lot of equipment here," Connor said. "O'Reilly, use the Humvee and look for a trailer or cart somewhere so that we can haul more of this-"

"_Connor?" _The unmistakable high-frequency crackles of a radioing voice rang loud and clear throughout the room. It'd emanated from Connor's hip, and she pulled out the offending radio.

"This is Connor," she said into the radio.

"_Connor, this is Edwards, calling from Cheyenne. I got the automated USSTRATCOM uplink online just about an hour ago, and accessed Space Command's satellite coverage. Looks like Skynet doesn't control it after all."_

"That's good. What do you have?"

"_Lots of crap is what I have, but you've got more pressing matters to attend to. You have some heat inbound from the northwestern corridor."_

"Fuck," McGrady swore.

"Why didn't you inform me earlier?" Connor asked.

"_The morning's hot. Surface heat was interfering with the real-time infrared scans. I was backtracking and checking out the satellites' logs from an hour ago when I saw the heat signatures. They look like small tanks, four or five of them."_

"T-1's, probably," Connor said. Her calmness freaked out her companions. "Do you have an ETA on them?"

"_That's another problem, Connor. ETA extrapolates to ten minutes."_

"You've gotta be kidding," Brookburne said. "Ten minutes?"

"We need to get out of here-" Villanueva was saying when Connor cut in.

"We need the equipment. We will stand our ground."

"Connor, you said that T-1's mount a pair of miniguns. We're not surviving that shit."

"We have no choice in any part of the matter. If we don't retrieve these vehicles, Cheyenne Mountain will be an easy target at all times, and we'll have considerable issues in attacking Skynet's positions." She raised her AA-12 and unloaded a fin-stabilized Frag-12 explosive round, holding it up to show Villanueva. "We have the necessary firepower. We can handle it."

Connor and the party then began setting up positions throughout the hangar. The bodies of the M1 main battle tanks and the M2 Bradley offered maximum protection from 20mm miniguns shells, so these were the chosen cover elements for gunners. Villanueva broke out a pair of FGM-172B SRAW's from a back room. The portable, lightweight rocket launchers were blessed with fire-and-forget powers by an onboard computer, and had excellent anti-armor capabilities. Meanwhile, the team loaded up on their explosives and took up their positions.

Connor herself was loading an SRAW when her radio came alive:

"_Heads up, Connor!" _came the agitated voice of Lt. Cayman. _"Incoming UGV's, five of 'em, heading in fast!"_

"Get back inside," Connor responded.

"_I'm dropping this fuel truck in the other hangar first; just give me a sec-_" His voice was interrupted by the sound of gunfire over the radio, which was then immediately heard outside as distant _thups_. _"Okay, never mind." _After a while, the gunfire stopped.

At this point, there was _a lot_ of arguing and anxiety among the people in the hangar, which were represented by a lot of shouting and taunting. Then the deep rumble of hybrid diesel/electric engines cut short this commotion. Everyone was made quiet enough that the shuffling of gravel could almost be heard through the engine noise. The rumbling grew louder and more ominous, everyone alert and watching the opened hangar doors, until someone saw a flash of white paint, and then:

"T-1's," Connor said. The robots had a strange anthropomorphic quality to them, with "heads" that had eye-like sensor packages, rotating torsos and "arm"-mounted rotary guns. These variants, however, were twice as tall as the original DARPA-CRS models, and were _bigger_ in more ways than that:

"Mother of God," Villanueva said, his binoculars perched on his face. "Those aren't miniguns. Not M134's – they're too big."

"What are they, M61's?" Top Hat asked. The M134 was called the "minigun" because it was a Gatling-style multi-barreled rotary gun that fired 7.62mm rounds; other weapons of similar operation, like the mentioned M61 Vulcans, used 20mm rounds.

"No, bigger," Villanueva said. "I think those are Air Force guns – GAU-12's! Everyone get behind the tanks, away from the Bradley!" The GAU-12 was a massive 25mm rotary _autocannon_, a variant of which was mounted on the F-35 Lightning II fighter. Its very purpose was tank-killing, and an M2 Bradley wasn't even a tank. McGrady, who was hiding behind the Bradley, took the hint and ran off to join O'Reilly behind an M1.

It was just in time that he got over to his new cover position, because as soon as he landed safely, the loud whirs of several electric motors permeated the senses of each and every one of the human fighters. The five T-1's' rotary weapons began to spin their barrels, and if all went well – which meant _very badly _for the human defenders – then the guns would soon be firing 3,600 rounds per minute.

And they did. While they were still at least two hundred meters away, the T-1's opened fire and then there was a lot of ballistic metal and fire in the air. Every third or fourth round was a tracer, and the rest were a hodgepodge of depleted-uranium armor piercers, incendiary rounds and explosive bits that fragmented dangerously. While most bullets didn't really spark and light up in the way movies portrayed them, these ones were an exception that impressed themselves on heavy armored vehicles.

It was like being in a fireworks show as various splashes of red and yellow lit up the room whenever something was hit. The concentration of tracers was incredibly dense and gave the illusion that a lot more bullets were being fired than in reality. The poor M2 Bradley was being pelted with many of the 25mm rounds, and soon the thing ignited its own ammunition stores, and was torn asunder in a mix of a deafening explosion and a hail of bullets. The M1 tanks, behind which were pinned five men and a woman, fared much better, but were also rocking slightly with the impacts.

However, two things gave the defenders a fair fighting chance. One, the T-1's' leadfests, while impressive and destructive, were highly inaccurate at this range, and the robots themselves were obviously not very well-equipped to handle the recoil of the aircraft guns; they needed to move closer and thus become vulnerable to the soldiers' own assault. Two, the machines could only fire their GAU-12s in half-second bursts – between which were seconds of resting time – lest the barrels overheat, or they be destroyed prematurely.

As the T-1's moved in, Villanueva took advantage of a short lull in the one-sided exchange of bullets and raised his SRAW missile launcher. Activating the onboard guidance system, he shot off a single missile at the lead tank. The matte-black projectile rocketed off towards the T-1, which immediately turned its torso to a side to evade the missile's flight path. The projectile failed to detonate on its target, but it clipped the servos that controlled the targeting for one of its target's weapon mounts, disabling that arm.

"Covering fire!" McGrady screamed as he stood up to shoot, but he was pushed down immediately by Top Hat.

"Fuck that shit, covering fire don't work on machines!" This was true, at least for the T-1's and their lack of survival instincts. Top Hat loaded seven Frag-12 grenades into his AA-12 shotgun and hit the closest tank, now fifty meters away, with the explosive shells. They detonated, all right, splashing magnificently against the tank, but with little effect on the sternum chestplate armor. He ducked just as soon as his target's guns started to spin up again, almost slipping and falling at the speed at which he dove down.

McGrady, recovering from Top Hat's push and swearing slightly despite his superior right above him, hoisted up his M4 and opened fire on the lead T-1. His bullets ricocheted right off the strong steel of the UGV, and he swore again, reaching into his belt for a 40mm grenade. He cracked open his underbarrel grenade launcher, loaded the 'nade inside, and slapped it shut. "Fire in the hole!" he yelled as he pulled up the ladder-like trajectory sight on his rifle. He aligned the tank in the sights with the appropriate range markings, and then pulled the trigger on the M203. A mortar-like _thwup_ ensued, followed by the resulting grenade arcing from the barrel to the T-1; the large explosion that came obscured the T-1 with a mound of dust and soil, but no apparent damage was dealt.

"Tough bastards," O'Reilly spat as he loaded his own M203 and shot a grenade at another T-1. His, however, landed straight on his target's sensor package. The lights on its head were blasted to hell and it started firing erratically. "Oh wow," he exclaimed, but didn't have the time to rejoice as he ducked, since that "erratic" fire happened to include a stray shot in the general direction of his face.

Brookburne, meanwhile, was doing very well – for a noncombatant. His shots with his AA-12 were straight and hit most of the time, but he was draining his supply of Frag-12's very quickly, to the point that O'Reilly stripped him of a quarter of his ammo so that someone _better_ could do the aiming.

Meanwhile, Connor was peeking just beyond the threshold of the tank behind which she was hiding, with Villanueva beside her. The major took occasional potshots at the enemy, but the tank they shared seemed to be magnetized to depleted uranium bullets. One of the incendiary rounds landed too close at some point, and singed Villanueva's skin. "Goddamn it!" he'd screamed, slapping at the burn with his helmet and swearing in a little bit of Spanish.

At that point, Connor decided to do something. She'd seemed very calm and composed this whole time, without having fired a shot, and whenever someone caught even the briefest sight of her, he thought that she was in shock. This, however, wasn't the case, as Connor tapped Villanueva on his back to draw his attention:

"Tell the men to target the autocannon mounting struts and joints. The weapons are supported by them alone; they are vulnerable to explosive impacts. The sensor package in the head has the same weaknesses, and might be damageable by regular rifle bullets."

Villanueva nodded, and passed the message onto O'Reilly, who was nearest to him.

"I got the head part easy," he shouted back, and then picked up his AA-12 to shoot at the suggested struts. Nine Frag-12's in rapid succession played inside the automatic shotgun's drum magazine, and went home to their target at the thin joint armor around a T-1's gun strut. Sparks flew as the massive GAU-12 dropped to the ground, hydraulic fluid bleeding from the stump of the strut.

There was a collective whoop among the men as the T-1 ended up disabled – this was the one whose other gun was clipped by Villanueva's SRAW missile. The other T-1's moved in to continue the assault now, their guns firing powerful bursts into the vehicle hangar. Celebration was definitely short-lived and better off not had, and this became extremely evident when one of the M1 tanks' front armor was totally breached, internal ammunition stores exploding violently. This happened _inside _the vehicle, so the blast wasn't too much of a problem for Brookburne, who'd been using it as cover. The _real_ problem was the fact that the M1 was now compromised, and a bullet in the right place could go through to the other side. 25mm incendiary or explosive bullets were designed to punch holes through tanks, and it only took one of them to take a "soft target's" arm, leg, or head off.

Connor ran over to Brookburne with tracers arcing overhead, and flashes of red striking uncomfortably close to her person. She dragged him over to the still well-off M1, behind which O'Reilly and Brookburne stayed, firing more explosive shots at the enemy.

She then started off for a side door at the hangar wall, leaving the safety of the tank, when McGrady grabbed her arm.

"What the hell are you doing!" he screamed at her.

"I'm going outside to flank them," she announced with a characteristic coldness to the situation at hand. For a moment, O'Reilly, McGrady, Villanueva, Top Hat and Brookburne had stopped firing, and just stared at her.

"Are you _fucking_ suicidal, woman?" McGrady screamed again.

Connor regarded McGrady with unnervingly innocent eyes, and then silenced any protests he and the men would have made with a clear statement of truth:

"No. I am a hardcore motherfucker." She pulled herself strongly off his grip – McGrady winced at the strength of her arm – and ran to the door, being trailed by an arcing barrage of fire. She disappeared out of sight as she drove herself into the white morning light, a scene contrasted against the yellow of the hangar's interior – a pale, unnaturally fiery shade brought about by a combination of sodium lamps, fiery bullet streaks and the burning wreckage of an M2 Bradley.

The men resumed firing, but this time with a renewed passion and vigor that was probably inspired by Connor's example. Or maybe it was the fact that a second T-1 had just been blown to bits by combined fire against its lightly-armored sensory head. Two T-1's advanced against them, for the first time entering the hangar now. They were only about twenty to thirty meters away now, and their autocannons were becoming demoralizing in their accuracy. However, because of "weapon cooldown time" (as O'Reilly described it), and the fact that only two were keeping up the bullets on them, there was a lot more in the way of opportunities to open fire. Without hesitation, the five remaining combatants took these opportunities as they arose – and sometimes even when they _didn't_ arise, as Villanueva demonstrated when he stood up, exposing himself completely while the T-1's were still firing, and unleashed a drum-fed torrent of Frag-12 on their softpoints.

So caught up were the men in their current affairs that they failed to notice a missing T-1. They had killed two, and two were now killing them – so where was evil robot tank number five?

* * *

"I am a hardcore motherfucker." Cameron's English vocabulary was very large, but sometimes it was filled with the wrong things. It did the job, however, and let her leave without looking suicidal – instead, she looked insane and bloodlusty.

Breaking into the light of the outside, she first scanned the surroundings for any other T-1's in the vicinity that were unaccounted for. While there was nothing, she found a weak heat signature up the road that didn't match the environment, so she sprinted over there to investigate. There she found the motionless body of Spc. Jacob Cayman, lying a fair distance away from a fuel truck that lay on its side.

She knelt down by him and the idea that he was dead surfaced among her mental processes, but a quick bio-scan revealed that this was not so. Instead of leaving him right then and there, she raised her hand, and slapped him across the face. The strength of a Terminator means that getting slapped by one is no pleasant experience; marriage to a particularly jealous Terminator should be a sight to see.

"Ow! What the-" Cayman's eyes shot open, and he went "Gyah!" before his body shot up – his head slamming against Cameron's own. While she didn't move, he _bounced _off her, hitting the ground again. The M2 Bradley that had been blown up looked to be in better shape than he was now.

"Are you all right?" Cameron asked him.

"Yes. No." Cayman rubbed his head, then saw the red bump appearing on Cameron's head. "Oh, damn it. Sorry. Are _you_ all right?"

"Why wouldn't I b-" The biosystem self-diagnostic that followed suggested that she was supposed to be in excruciating pain. "Oh. I have a metal plate in my head."

"Well _that_ explains it. Shit." His head burned, his body hurt like _fuck_ and to make matters worse, that goddamn heavy gunfire in the distance was so loud that- wait, _heavy gunfire?_ "Is everyone okay?" Cayman sat up again, but a little more slowly now so that no more heads would come into sharp contact with each other.

"They're engaging the T-1's now."

"And you?"

"I'm going to flank the T-1's."

"I'm coming with you," he said as he pulled the AA-12 off his shoulder. "I have-"

"No," Cameron commanded. "You stay here and guard the fuel truck. We can still use its contents, and we need them for the vehicles."

"So _you're_ going to take them on alone?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Damn."

"I know." She ran off in the hangar's direction, but considerably more towards the entrance.

As she got closer, she realized that aside from the disabled T-1 and the ruined T-1, two more had advanced towards the open hangar doors and were attacking her squad. So where was the fifth one-

The answer to this question was readily made known to her, as evil robot tank number five emerged from behind the far wall of the hangar and spun up its barrels, its torso and dual GAU-12s facing her in all their glory. It was down the road, which went uphill from the hangar, and thus was at lower ground, but its saturation gunfire would be enough to splash Cameron from that distance with a lot of 25mm incendiary/explosive rounds.

She was not invincible. An M1 tank, despite being considerably primitive in comparison, had better survivability than she did when it came to large projectiles with immense kinetic force being thrown at her. This being the case, the fact that these same large projectiles could destroy an M1 carried over to her coltan endoskeleton. The first one would strike her and slow her down, and then the next one, and the next one, and within a second, perhaps twenty or even thirty of the heavy bullets would have smashed against her body, shaving off components and damaging internal machinery, ultimately leading to a power core destabilization or permanent CPU damage – both of which would lead to the same deadly conclusion.

But she was smarter than an M1, and smaller, and faster in many ways. The spindly, humanoid Terminator architecture was useful in more ways than infiltration. Cameron braced as she ran even faster towards the T-1, its barrels nearly reaching the necessary speed for maximum rate of fire. She was immune to 5.56, 7.62, 9mm, and .50 cal BMG – all of which had been the only things that had ever struck her – so she never had to use her skills of evasion that Skynet had programmed into new models, to effect better lifespan when dealing with plasma projectiles.

As she picked up the pace of her sprint towards the attacking tank, reaching an inhuman forty kilometers per hour, the thing opened fire.

It was magnificent; a single T-1 unleashing a barrage of massive 25mm tracers, explosive rounds, incendiary shells, and depleted uranium rounds, _from two autocannons_, all on a single, rather _small _human target. The road on which Cameron was running was torn up into cracked fragments of asphalt and rock, and such an amount of dust was raised that her running form was concealed, and whenever the incendiary rounds flew and hit home, they erupted the flying particulate with red or yellow flashes. Tracers arced and flew like supersonic fireflies dashing for a tree. The noise was deafening, like endless, contiguous claps of thunder that were punctuated by snaps and thuds on soil and road.

But Cameron was unfazed, and more importantly she was _unaffected. _She ran in an erratic, zigzagging manner that made targeting her difficult – T-1's _still _weren't smart at all – and in epic, _The Matrix_-like fashion, she dodged bullets. Every round that would have struck her flew harmlessly by as special "twitch" servos and magnetic guides activated all over her body. These could manipulate her endoskeleton in any direction over very short, centimetric distances, but at incredibly high speeds. They served their purpose well: her shoulder dropped a few millimeters to allow a bullet passage, and her thigh swayed to a side in polite agreement with another bullet. Her feet jumped over trajectories and her head tilted and nodded in recognition of the many projectiles flying towards her, offering them the respect they deserved but never letting them touch her.

And as she closed in, picking up the pace, the bullets became more accurate and their flight times less, but she still dodged them with ease and when she was barely fifteen meters away, she braced her legs, as though crouching, and with a boost of electrical energy to her leg motors, she jumped higher than any human could ever have, and landed straight on top of the body of the T-1. She was inside its firing radius now, and the thing swerved its torso in desperation. It swung its cannons around their struts, trying to hit her or make a decent aim, but she avoided them with such grace, supporting herself with her arms and lifting her legs in neat handstands on occasion, that she appeared to be dancing over the robot. Finally, when she found herself an opportunity to strike, she did…

* * *

"That's right! Die, you metal motherfucker!" McGrady screamed as he broke his cover and ran recklessly towards the T-1, depressing his trigger with such force that he bent the plastic covering around it, and deposited so many explosive shells onto the thing's head over such a short period of time, that it seemed to be illuminated with an eerie red glow. At last, the final sparks of its machinery exploded from its body and the thing drooped, and no louder scream of victory could be had from the men than when this last enemy fell.

"Yeah! Now _that's_ what meat and bones can do!" O'Reilly screamed.

"See, this is what I was talking about when I said 'no' at the UGV seminar," Villanueva said, grinning. "Humans always win."

A side door opened, and Cayman limped inside, holding his leg that seemed to be hurt. "Hey, guys. Did I miss anything?"

"Five aircraft cannon-decked robots versus six humans with 'nade launchers and shotguns?" Top Hat laughed. "You missed the time of your life."

"Guys, where's Cameron?" O'Reilly suddenly asked.

"Yeah, where is she?"

"She said she went out to flank the T-1's-"

"Wait a minute," Brookburne cut in. "There _were _five of them, weren't there?"

"Yeah, there were- _wait. _That was the fourth one down, that last one you killed, McGrady."

"Jesus," McGrady said in realization. "Where's the fifth? And _where the fuck is Connor?_"

The answer to the former arrived in a demonstrative form. The last T-1 drove slowly into view from the left side of the hangar doors, and the ominous glow of its sensory "eyes" chilled the men's souls as they realized that in their ecstasy, they'd all broken their cover.

O'Reilly raced to grab a 40mm grenade from his belt and shoved it into his M203, but before he could fire, he was stopped by Villanueva. "Wait. Look."

The T-1 was seemingly frozen in time, completely motionless and dumb in its "gaze." Then, its head fell off. And its guns came off their mounts, and sparks flew from its back as a huge plate of matte-white steel came off – showing the face and body of Cameron Connor.

The men looked on in awe at this sight: The sun was behind her, and its light bathing her back gave her an almost godly glow. Her skin and clothes were untattered and pristine, not a milliliter of blood to be found anywhere despite what had clearly been an epic battle for her.

* * *

Future John Connor was the leader of the Resistance, and an awesome fighter he was indeed. But in the end, he was only human – a cold, steely one at that who bore more resemblance to the machines he fought, than to his people. And he could be killed by anything that would kill an ordinary man. The inspiration he gave was primarily in the skill of his leadership, the strength of his will, and his courage under fire. He was no superhuman; he was just a strong human.

Cameron was not human. She'd be perceived as brave by the men and women she led when she charged "valiantly" into battle, but the truth was, it would take a lot more than a few low-caliber bullets to take her down. Her leadership would be efficient, and her knowledge almost magical, so that she would be as an oracle of victory for the human Resistance. And in the end, her fighting skill would be disproportionate to what people would see her as capable of doing; she could take on the likes of this T-1 and destroy them with _little to no preamble. _

Therefore, the image she projected and the inspiration she bestowed on her men, suggested not just a strong human leader, but a Savior – nearly invincible in will, confident and strong, willing to either lay down her life for the glory of humankind, or destroy machines with her bare hands to achieve the same purpose.

And therefore, when she stood, mounted atop the ruined wreckage of a mighty but vanquished adversary, the men looked upon her as though she was like Nike, Goddess of Victory, as she fell behind Athena in her wartime affairs. They sought her words, for the woman they beheld was known for them.

She pondered what to say. A speech? Too dramatic and passé. A passage? What good was it to steal of others' words, when she was to make a name for herself?

The latter choice's reasoning was wrong. Instead, she quoted fiction, but strong fiction, and fiction to which she related. She changed the words a little, just so that it would be apropos to the fire that swept the Earth – the fire that she would extinguish with her fist and fury.

And so Cameron Connor, from the fallen T-1 that served as her pedestal, spoke:

"No power in the goddamn world can stop me."

And there was glory.

* * *

In the dining hall of Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, sixty people gathered around six, who recounted the epic tale of their first combat against the lackeys of the machine who committed genocide on man.

Among the storytellers, Brookburne was just happy he was alive, and was quite open to the fact that he wasn't very good with the weaponry he'd used against the enemy. He'd taken cover most of the time, and took many shots that either missed or glinted off. Still, he was commended for his bravery by men who braved insurgents in Iraq.

Villanueva was a leader, and his example was strong and motivating. He had taken much in the way of shooting first and he knew to uplift morale by damaging the armored opponents when they were quiet for times ever so short. He also spoke of how he had directed the assault carefully while Connor had disappeared, and commended his men for their efficiency.

McGrady by far told the most extravagant tales. Not only did his character somehow jump onto a T-1 and smash a grenade into its face, and not only did he drive a burning Humvee into another, and not only did he run with a bulky SRAW towards the enemy, facing gunfire all around him – he also "carried Cameron Connor away from the destruction of one of the M1 Abrams tanks, saving her life in the process." There was applause from the listeners, and much humored grumbling from those who knew what really happened.

On the topic of Connor, there was one thing common among the stories that had been told: She was the key to their success, and her fighting skill, while it had never been seen by any of them, was unparalleled. Her knowledge of the enemy's weaknesses and her single-handed destruction of the final T-1 brought applause to the crowd of onlookers and listeners.

It was truly unfortunate that Connor had not chosen to spend time with the men, for they would have pressed upon her with their admiration. But they all understood how tired she must have been from the fighting, so they had let her leave for her quarters again.

* * *

Of three M1A2's, two were usable. The M1A1 had been destroyed. The M2 Bradley was gone too. At least the MLRS was left unscathed from the battle. They had also recovered the guns from the T-1's, which turned out _not_ to be GAU-12's, but lightweight variants which fired the same projectiles but at lower muzzle strength, and with customized stabilizers for better support on the tanks.

The fuel truck had been returned to its upright state by a construction crane, and fuel was distributed among the empty tanks. A large cache of antitank weapons had been found inside the base as well. The haul was good, and they got most of it back to the base on the first strip, on trailers dragged by Humvees or tanks.

Cameron sat at her bed, combing her hair. She did this a lot in the presence of the men, and they were made curious at the sight of the hardcore Resistance leader keeping her face attractive even in the most deathly of wars. As she did this, she pondered the arsenal that they'd taken from Fort Carson, and how there would be more future excursions into that base before it was stripped. She was considering making it a forward outpost as well when her self-diagnostics reported an anomaly in her biological covering.

She looked in the mirror and saw a single, silvery tear rolling down her cheek. Wiping it off with a finger, she tapped her eye duct and checked to see if anything was irritating it, but there was nothing. Running a memory test through her on-die CPU memory controllers, she found out that yesterday's thinking session had left more associative pathways hanging loose than she originally estimated. It seemed that she'd need to start writing a program for passive memory arrangement sometime, so that in the form of dream cycles, she wouldn't have such random anomalies popping over her anymore.

But the program would have to wait. She instead traced the cause of the tear to a memory that lay in the same block as her memory of embracing John four years ago – but this one seemed to have many more "tags" connected to what he had said then:

"Sometimes, Cameron… I wish you felt sorrow, and sadness and loneliness."

Her questioning response had been "Those are all negative emotions. Why would you want me to experience them?"

His reply was simple: "So that I could comfort you when you felt them."

The memory in question took place with these parameters in mind, and as she ran through them again, reloading them to main memory, another tear fell down her cheek. She wondered why.

* * *

John awoke in the middle of the night to sharp gasps from another room. They hadn't come from his nightly dream of Judgment Day, since they persisted despite his lucid state, and so quietly opening his door, he stalked around the corridor searching for the source of the noise.

When he passed by Derek's door, the sounds became louder and he realized that someone was crying. The thought occurred to him that Derek crying would've been a mystifying sight. This was the man who did not hesitate to shoot another in front of a cowering little girl. What would he be crying for? Maybe he held remorse that he didn't show. Was that what John Connor was going to be? Cold, unfeeling, outwardly taciturn? Well, the sobs weren't coming from his room, so the thought would have to be resolved at a later date.

When he passed by his mother's door, a feminine moan of sorrow escaped from shuddering lips, and he wondered why his mother would be crying. Perchance the stress had finally broken her – and could it really have been just "finally?" Maybe she cried every night but didn't show it. She had to be strong for her son; moping over tortured emotions would not help him. And yet, maybe that_ would_ help him. Maybe John Connor didn't need to be _constructed_; maybe he needed to _evolve_. It wasn't like the Savior of Man came in a box that read "Some Assembly Required" and when you opened it, out popped a normal human being who needed to be taught how to be emotionless and full of steel.

The crying was not from his mother's room, and his train of thought derailed into oblivion. He looked over to the door that led to Cameron's room, and decided that it was the least unlikely place from which sobs would emanate, so he started back off for his room, when the cries of such sadness came back to haunt his ears. He decided to check the Terminator's room anyway.

When he opened the door, he bore witness to a most unsettling sight: the quivering, repressed, _crying_ form of Cameron. She was seated at the foot of her bed, her legs bunched up against her chest and her arms bracing them close, her face buried in her knees, and the unmistakable elements of mournful weeping radiating from her.

"Oh my God," he observed as he walked to her. "Cameron?" He'd never seen a robot cry before, and he was no expert in handling such a situation. It scared him.

"J-John," she was able to make out through sputtering breaths as she raised her head to look at him. Her tears were shining orbs in the moonlight, trailed by little strands of wetness down her softly glowing cheeks.

"What's happening to you?" He knelt down in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders.

"I'm p-performing a diagnostic test of new em-emotional synthesis. A…an emulation of one of the stronger emotions: extreme sadness and d-depression."

"So you're simulating this crying?" He felt relieved that she was just trying her new feelings out for a spin, but her body shuddered beneath his touch and he felt bad for his relief.

To make matters worse, he was wrong about her feelings. "Not a sim…simulation," she said with the strain and effort apparent. "An emulation. The difference is…is akin to a computer following pre-programmed and pre-drawn rules…for human speech in order to pass a Turing Test, and a…a computer using the same method of speech processing as humans…to achieve the same results…The l-latter is emulation…" She stopped talking as her sobbing grew in intensity and she tightened her hold on herself. John moved away from in front of her and sat with her by her side.

"Okay, okay, I get it. So how are you emulating this?"

"I…I built a program. Not elaborate, but simple and low-level. Instead of _simulating_ emotions when the situation is appropriate, I am constantly…feeling. Not big blocks of emotion like 'happy' or 'sad'. E-every parameter is considered and c-contributes to my emotional state, no matter…no matter how miniscule the change is."

"Why'd you pick sadness?" He was curious about this awesome new development in her persona, but he also knew that this "emulation" approached the real deal.

"Best environment for testing. Right now, I'm…" she abruptly stopped speaking and began to rock from side to side.

John realized that this being the real deal, to stop her from crying, he'd have to _be _the real deal just as well. He put his arm around her shoulder and drew her close to him, laying her head on his shoulder and gently stroked her hair.

"Right now," she continued in his hold, "I'm presenting false f-failure conditions to my objectives programming. I'm telling myself that you're dead, and that it was my fault that you died and that I could've done more to save you but I didn't." She said it all at once and it clearly disturbed her.

It disturbed John, too. She was putting herself through her equivalent of some of the worst kinds of traumatic mental stress, in the form of sorrow. She lived to serve and protect him, and the utter failure of her life's mission would've produced this very response if she were human.

"Why are you doing this to yourself, Cameron?"

"You- you said you wanted me to."

"_What_?"

"You said, 'Sometimes, Cameron… I-I wish you felt sorrow, and sadness and loneliness'." It had been in his voice that spoke, but Cameron's whimpering could be heard through it.

"Oh God," John said. He held her tightly and, taking a deep breath to stave off his own feelings, kissed her cheek. The salty tears stung his lips, but he wanted to atone for that horrible thing he made her do. "Cameron, I'm sorry. I was stupid. That was a selfish thing to say. I hadn't cared for your feelings, because…" He hesitated. "I…I didn't think they were real. I wanted to believe that they were real, but it's complicated." John then came to the conclusion that nothing he could say on that topic would be good for the cybernetic girl in his arms.

"Cameron, I'm sorry. It's okay, I'm here. I'm not dead, I'm alive and you're doing a great job of protecting me – better than anybody I've ever known besides my mom." His hold on her tightened and his fingers brushed her hair downwards. He felt her arms go around him too. "Don't cry. I'm sorry. I was selfish." He shushed into her ear and kissed her cheek again.

Slowly, but surely, her cries softened, until nothing came out of her mouth anymore, and she was still, melting into the embrace that she and John shared. And then, like a knife, her default pattern of speech cut through the whole mood of it all.

"Diagnostic complete," she said, her arms' hold loosening on John's body. As he heard this, he felt his heart come crashing down like a fighter plane that had just met an SA-2 surface-to-air missile.

_She's still just a machine_, John thought dejectedly as he let go of her and watched her stand up. She walked towards her door, to go outside and probably stare out the window again, looking passively for threats.

John was going to leave too – a little downtrodden at what had just happened – when she called his name:

"John." Her back was turned to him as she voiced.

"Yeah?" he acknowledged.

She turned to him, wiped the tears off her face, and smiled. "Thank you." Her face glimmered in the moonlight, the remains of moist tears like jewels on her face. And her voice was full of honesty that contained her gratitude, a soft-spoken quality that burned John's heart. As she left the room, he was left wondering.

It was partly her humanity that comprised this contemplation, and mostly, just _how _strongly he felt for her at that very moment, in her _emulated _sorrowful state, which she put on just for him, and wherein for a few minutes of saddening perfection, she was a girl who could love, and whom he could love.

* * *

"Connor," O'Reilly said as he knocked on the woman's door, being sure not to open it lest he be again greeted by her naked glory.

It took her a while to respond, but she eventually emerged – _fully clothed_ – to meet the man. "Yes?"

"We have company. Two newcomers out the blast doors. You said you wanted to see all people coming in."

"That's right. Thank you, I'll be right there."

* * *

Had O'Reilly not interrupted her _yet again_, Cameron might've been able to resolve more memory issues and look deeper into this crying that she very well remembered. Alas, it was of extreme importance that the people who went into Cheyenne Mountain were not made of metal, so she went up to the blast doors at the entrance and activated the opening mechanisms. They were slow as usual.

A young man, perhaps fifteen or so years old, and a child who couldn't be more than ten, walked warily into the facility, through the metal doors that had separated them earlier. The first person they saw was Cameron, and the older boy spoke first.

"Are you…Cameron Connor?" he asked.

"Yes, I am."

"We're from Los Angeles. I brought my brother here to the underground when the missiles fell. We were holed up with some other survivors, and we heard over a ham radio that you were calling people over to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado."

"You're safe here," she said reassuringly. "What are your names?"

The older child spoke again. "My name is Derek Reese. This is my brother, Kyle."

An observer may have noticed a glimmer in Cameron's eyes.


	5. The Heart of the Savior

**Author: MORE THAN HALF A MONTH! Sorry, schoolwork! Anyway, to compensate, this is EVEN LONGER than the previous chapter! :D:D:D More author note at the end of the story. **

**Also, a URL exists in the story. Simply replace the (dotcom) with the necessary . com to access the link. FF culls this stuff...**

* * *

"_One of the things I remember most about Cameron Connor is that she had a heart. We were all used to some of the greatest bastards on Earth giving us orders, and here was a woman as good as any of them – if not better – and yet, despite her air of coldness, somehow she showed compassion for us that no one else would've made known. No one was barred from her presence, and she talked to everyone as equals in the suffering of humankind. This did not make her any weaker a leader than anyone else, however; simultaneously she was the mother of war, sister to soldier, and wife to warrior. And we never forgot this, because through the heart of the savior, we knew her person well."_

-_Maj. Gen. (ret.) James Gardner Scott, on Cameron Connor_

**The Heart of the Savior**

Master Sergeant Peter Jameson O'Reilly woke up to the smell of breakfast.

It wasn't yet known just_ what_ the breakfast comprised. Regardless, this would've been a fairly normal occurrence to any morning-arisen man – prior to April 11, 2011, that is. Now that it was 6:30 am of the 19th, however, the smell of breakfast was a welcome but still unexpected olfactory experience.

It would've also been normal to anyone who lived in an average room in an average house. But Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, and the steel-encased, spring-mounted living quarters within, certainly _weren't_ representative of the baseline suburban dwelling; the only possible source of this smell was also rather far away, in a huge mess hall in another freestanding building, in the gargantuan excavation within the mountain itself. Given these factors, a smell of breakfast was at best an anomaly – and since it was an anomaly that _smelled good_, he was most compelled to investigate.

As he again walked through the corridors of the living quarters, he made sure this time that his steps were soft and deliberate. After the morning of glorious man-versus-machine combat, the whole day before was spent in some mystical, situation-appropriate (and yet simultaneously situation-_in_appropriate) revelry, labeled by some as "The Last Party on Earth." The parties sure got wild at the end of the world, and the alcohol flowed more freely than water. Because of this, "quite a few" people were incapacitated to the most profound degrees imaginable – a huge mistake, in his opinion – and many of these "quite a few" were now experiencing glorious hangovers that would've made Lindsay Lohan blush, or made Jack Thompson support_ Grand Theft Auto IV._ (The latter would come after Skynet repented and made peace with humanity, though.) This meant that behind each door might be found a groggy, half-conscious man who still had the physical capacity to strike down the source of noisy steps, and O'Reilly would rather not provoke this hypothetical drunk.

When he arrived at the mess hall, he was greeted by the sight of seven men seated at one of the very long metal tables, which had equally long metal benches situated on both sides. As they chatted about themselves, a large platter of pancakes sat in front of them, and each had a plate, a fork and a butter knife at his place.

Pancakes. Yum.

"Morning," he said sleepily after a groan.

"Morning," the men responded in unusual unison.

"Pancakes?" O'Reilly asked, pointing at the platter of brown discs.

"Connor's doing," one man proclaimed through a mouthful of the stuff. "Woman can cook a good pancake."

"Just like she can cook a good robot," another joked. "Wonder if she can cook a man."

"Yeah, I bet she can cook a good sausage in her oven." Loud snickers filled the room.

_Ugh_, came the mental grimace on O'Reilly's part. He was reminded of seeing the woman naked. He reflexively scratched his head to remove the offending thought as though it were a piece of dandruff.

"Where is she?" he asked.

"More pancakes." The responder poked a thumb in the direction of the kitchen. "She's been doing them for almost an hour now. I wonder if she'll try to feed all seventy mouths here."

O'Reilly walked over to the metal doors, behind which was the kitchen. As he moved, he saw the newcomer Reese brothers seated by themselves at a distant table, eating their own pancakes. That Derek one looked like a high school freshie, and the younger Kyle probably was barely into grade school. They were too young for this mess.

But was that true, really? Pressure variance waves brought about by nuclear explosions didn't exactly discriminate between those "too young" and those "old enough" when they massacred millions at a time. It wasn't a matter of age anymore, but rather a matter of being prepared to fight for your life, and to survive the best you can. And for that, the kids' young age and the mental malleability which came with it would prove to their advantage, making any kind of preparation easy enough.

The opening of the metal doors introduced him to the smell of eggs, flour and batter, the sound of a beating ladle and a number of electric mixers – and the sight of Cameron Connor in a white jacket and pants, with a blue-and-yellow floral apron and a ridiculously large chef's hat, or toque, on her head. It was so big that it sometimes slid below her forehead and covered her eyes, which caused her to push it up slightly ever so often. O'Reilly couldn't help but laugh.

His minor guffaws drew the good chef's attention. "What's funny?" Connor asked.

"The hat. Way too big."

Connor reached up and patted the top of her hat, creasing the base. "I couldn't find any others. The last chef must have had a big head."

"I don't think you need a hat to cook pancakes, but it looks nice anyway."

"Okay."

"What are you doing?"

"I'm making two hundred and forty-four more pancakes. Each person gets four pancakes. Nine have already had their share."

O'Reilly gaped. "Two hundred and forty-four pancakes."

"Yes, two hundred and forty-four pancakes."

"_Two hundred and fo- _never mind." He sighed. "I'll help." He was about to grab some pancake-synthesizing implements when Connor stopped him.

"Wash your hands," she said sternly.

O'Reilly took a step back from the cooking utensils. "Uh, yes ma'am."

"Thank you for helping."

"Yeah, sure," came the reply through the sound of water on hands. When this aspect of hygiene was complete, O'Reilly took a ladle and began working on pancakes. There were many to be made.

Upon the completion of Pancake Seventy-Six, O'Reilly broke the vocal silence. "How's it been?"

"What?"

"You locked yourself in your room while everyone partied."

"Oh. I was sleepy. It takes a lot of effort to kill a T-1."

"Yes, it does," O'Reilly said, remembering the grenade launcher "thwupping" in his hands. He'd written something in his journal about that:

_Oh, sweet thwup, thwup, thwup…  
Oh shit DUCK AND DON'T GET UP!  
Oh sweet thwup, thwup BOOM!  
GODDAMN bullets 'cross the room!_

He'd also added a singsong tune to the stanza, and sometimes he could be heard idly singing the M203 song. It was silly. "How did you kill it?"

"The T-1 is a bad design, I'll admit," Connor explained with the faintest hint of a scowl on her face. "It has a very limited view frustum and its torso spin rate is slower than it should be." O'Reilly raised an eyebrow; was she lamenting her bad design on the things that nearly killed them? If she'd had her way and_ fixed_ this bad design, maybe they'd all be dead instead of partying. "This design flaw helped me, though."

"That was some dangerous stuff you did there."

"I know. But if I hadn't done that, the T-1 would have flanked you, and you'd all have been killed. And then I would've been killed. Taking it from this perspective, it wasn't very dangerous at all, in comparison."

"Right, I see your point." O'Reilly did, but still had the image of Connor as being that hardcore motherfucker. He went back to pancakes, beating rapidly at a bowl of batter.

The synthesis of Pancake One Hundred and Thirty-Nine saw O'Reilly talk again: "The party was a bad idea."

"Yes, it was," Connor replied. "But it lifted the men's spirits."

"Suppose it did."

"Morale is sometimes more useful than capability."

"I guess so. It would've been better if they left out the alcohol, though."

"Yes. If Skynet attacks now, we are _fucked_." Connor put a lot of emphasis on the last word.

"Yep." O'Reilly went back to pancakes, frying a batch of batter on a huge pan. Four pancakes per person sounds rather small, but each pancake had a diameter of more than a foot. Connor had found a lot in the way of ingredients.

Pancake Two Hundred Point Five was undergoing a transition to Pancake Two Hundred and One, when it became Connor's turn to break the silence: "What are you doing?"

"Uh, making pancakes," was O'Reilly's reply. Well, what the hell? That was what he was doing, wasn't it?

"No. I mean when you talk about parties and ask about yesterday, while we're making pancakes. What are you doing?"

"Oh, I don't know. I guess I'm just making conversation."

"Why?"

"Well, Cameron, you don't talk much to anyone, and no one talks much to you. It just seems like something I should do."

"Oh. Okay."

* * *

Pancake Two Hundred and Forty-Four was completed at 8:15 am without incident, and O'Reilly went out with a pair of trays to distribute platters of pancakes among the tables. A few more people were coming in now, all apparently having been attracted by the smell of _breakfast_, and they came in various degrees of hung-overness. A man walked in what looked like a drunken stupor, but was actually the product of dizziness and weakness _following_ such inebriation. Another soldier was being assisted by two others, his arms over their shoulders as they struggled to bring him to a table. This one probably couldn't throw a rock to save his life.

"Hey, O'Reilly," Top Hat called out as he entered the room, noting the trays in O'Reilly's hands. "Waiter much?"

"I helped Cameron make the pancakes."

"Cameron? Oh, Connor. She made these things?" Top Hat sat down at a table as O'Reilly deposited his load. "Smells good."

"Yeah."

Connor walked in from the kitchen, balancing _four _trays on her _two_ hands, and they never seemed to tilt more than a couple of degrees in unlucky directions as she walked from table to table, putting down a platter of pancakes as she transitioned.

"Good stuff," Top Hat said almost indistinctly through a brown mouthful. "Nice hat, Connor." At least this last sentence was said through a less filled-up mouth.

"Thank you." She pushed the hat back up as it fell down over her eyes. O'Reilly gasped to prevent the laugh from surfacing.

When all of this distribution was done, the room held about fifteen people. When Connor and O'Reilly sat down to eat at a table at the back of the room, the population went up to sixteen: A very loud and incoherent McGrady walked into the dining hall, his balance utterly lost and his mental resolve even further down in the dumps. He came in singing (badly) a song from a Broadway musical that involved misunderstood _Wicked_ witches:

"_I think I'll try defying gravity, and you can't pull me down…_" Someone could've given him points for staying true to the lyrics, but the vocals were unearthly, guttural, alien bellows which defied _reason_. It wasn't singing; it was more like a barely articulate tribal chant that followed no known methodical beat, no detectable rhythmic patterns, and certainly no melody that could have been conceived by the sane and lucid minds of the Earth. But of course, McGrady belonged to neither the sane nor the lucid minds of the Earth – even when he wasn't recovering from alcohol.

Wait, _was_ he just recovering from alcohol?

"That is a bad hangover," O'Reilly observed.

"That isn't a hangover. Private McGrady is still drunk." Connor watched the unsteady figure.

"How's that possible?"

"He probably didn't sleep."

McGrady became aware of pancakes after some indeterminate period of singing the song – with remarkably consistent lyrical skill, but the same extraterrestrial vocals – and went on to investigate random platters of brown discs.

"Wait, what is this, now?" he asked of the atmosphere – which meant, really, no one in particular. "Pancakes? And good fucking pancakes too?"

"Yeah," said the unlucky man whose pancakes were the subject of McGrady's observations.

"Who made…who made them?"

"Connor," said a few men in unison, pointing to the back of the room.

"Connor? Ah, Connor!" The prime exemplar of drunkenness made his sloppy way towards Connor's position. "Connor, Connor, Connor. Leader of human resistance... against evil computers….destroyer of gun-toting robots…hardcore motherfucker…genius military designer… and now goddamn _good_ pancake chef? Hell, the only thing missing's…a …a rockin' hot face and body. Oh wait. You already have those."

Connor eyed the man with a curiosity that O'Reilly watched long and hard. He wanted to save her very much at this point. No one deserved such madness.

"You know, Connor," McGrady said as he pirouetted – _what the fuck? _thought O'Reilly – and sat right next to Connor on her bench. "We could make-" He paused and put his arm around her shoulder, drawing her close. "-a beautiful couple. Whaddaya say, Connor? Connor, Cameron? Or may I call you…_Caaaam._" His voice drew out the "Caaaam" ridiculously, and persisted with the offensive syllabication even as his head drooped off to a side, his body swung backwards, and he fell over the bench and onto the floor, totally knocked out.

Connor bent down to look at his motionless form. "No, we would not make a 'beautiful couple'. And no, you may not call me 'Cam.'" She took his arm, brought his body up to her shoulder height, and sat him up against a wall.

As McGrady had made his intoxicated advances, an anticipating silence had fallen over the room, and when this sitting-down of the offending party was complete, loud applause and laughter knifed mercilessly through the quietness.

O'Reilly laughed too, and turned back just in time to see Major Villanueva and Spc. Cayman enter the room. Top Hat took his plate and left his seat to stay with them, and O'Reilly followed suit, leaving Connor to eat alone.

"Morning, Major," O'Reilly and Top Hat said in order.

"These pancakes are good," Villanueva said. "Couple of minutes ago, I'd be asking who made them, but it looks like everything around here's Connor's doing."

"She makes a good pancake," Cayman commented.

"Did you drink last night?" O'Reilly asked Villanueva.

"Drink? No. I don't drink."

"That's a surprise."

"Cap'n Edwards said the same thing when I asked him," Top Hat said, "But he's asleep in the toilet, so I don't know whether I can trust him."

"Did Connor drink?" Villanueva asked back.

"No," O'Reilly said. "She didn't even go to the party."

"Good girl," Cayman observed. "Good leader, I think."

"Yeah, about that," Villanueva said. "Let me tell you boys something about that woman. Now Connor, she's brilliant and all. But she's damn reckless." He frowned. "That stunt she pulled on the T-1? A little less luck and we wouldn't have a Skynet engineer on our team anymore. Don't suppose any of you wanna try to follow her example that way."

O'Reilly coughed loudly enough that it sounded exactly as artificial as it_ was_. "If she hadn't done what she did, that flanking bot would have kicked our asses straight to hell and _then_ killed her too. Same outcome plus six more deaths."

"She could've used some backup," Top Hat added. "Sorry, Jake," he said to Cayman. "You don't count. You were thrown out of a toppled-over fuel truck."

"Shut up, _Peggie_." This caused the two men to grapple at each other's throats before Villanueva stopped them.

"In any ca- _ah! _Stop it, you two! In any case, let's just hope, with her attitude, Connor lives long enough to help us stop the damn computer."

"Speaking of Connor, is that still her sitting near what's left of McGrady?"

"Yeah, that's her." O'Reilly looked in her direction. "She's been eating alone since day one." He recounted how, from the first dinner of April 11, 2011, to today's April 19 breakfast, he'd never observed her eating with anyone. O'Reilly had sat with her for a few minutes earlier, but that didn't last.

"Excuse me," O'Reilly said as he understood what he'd just said, and stood up from his seat. He walked to the place where a woman sat at a table, and near where a man sat unconscious against a wall.

As he drew up next to Connor, he asked, "Mind if I sat here?"

Connor's brown eyes looked widely up at him, then reset. "No, I don't mind."

"All right." He descended onto the table across her and continued his first pancake. Each forkful of the hardened batter mix saw him try to observe some reaction on Connor's part to his position, but always her face was down, just eating her own food in silence. There was a strange manner about her that was actually a _lack_ of any mannerism whatsoever. She never brushed away her long hair, or crossed her legs, or tapped her fingers or anything of the sort; always she was perfectly still, focused on whatever she was doing. O'Reilly thought of it as some kind of tactile tunnel vision, as not even the faintest hint of a subconscious action would surface from the still seas of her stiff person.

On finishing his first pancake after three minutes, he decided that Connor wouldn't speak to him unless he did, and he said, "So Con-" Well, that went well. He was immediately interrupted by three "Excuse me's" on either side of the table. Top Hat, Cayman and Villanueva had ventured forth from their own table to present their own company to the relatively quiet woman who was going to be their leader for the next – oh, who knows how long?

The reasoning for this was good enough on all counts: The three men had agreed that Connor was no military woman, and there would be no point in distancing themselves from her. If someone was going to lead them, then shouldn't they talk to that someone? Know how the minds of each bitch or bastard of authority worked? If not to better understand the Mandates of Cameron Connor, then maybe it would be to know whether those Mandates came from a mind that was as stable as a submarine in Cat-5 hurricane seas – or a petty fishing trawler atop the same waters.

"Morning, Connor," each man said, voices overlapping each other.

"Good morning," she said, nodding to each.

"These are some good pancakes," Top Hat commented, slicing up his second fluffy disc.

"Yes. Peter helped."

"Yeah," Villanueva went. "The two of you seem to be on a first-name basis." His finger dashed between pointing at her and O'Reilly.

"He's my runner."

"That explains it?"

"Yes, it does."

"Okay." Villanueva was quieted. _Kinda cold_. Well, hell, she was. She rarely smiled, she rarely spoke, and ate alone.

"Did you always want to be a military computer scientist who builds sentient missile systems?" Cayman asked. Rather out of the blue. "Just asking."

"No. I used to want to be a ballerina."

"Well, _that_'s a small difference between jobs," Top Hat snorted.

"I took ballet classes, and then I hurt my foot. Then I wanted to take up acting, but they said I was too stiff. So I studied Computer Science in college. It was easy because math and Chomsky context-free grammars are easy, and I graduated quickly."

"So in order, we have ballerina, actress, and computer scientist." Villanueva ticked off a finger with each recital. "You have one interesting life, Connor."

"Yes. I've also studied Theoretical Physics and Mechanical Engineering." They stared at her. "What is it?" she asked.

"I took up Architecture," Cayman said, and then everyone looked at him. "What?" he shrugged. "I like houses."

"As much as you like landmines?" O'Reilly asked him with a raised eyebrow.

"Shut up."

"What turned you into a _hardcore motherfucker, _Connor?" Top Hat asked.

"I only said that so that McGrady would let go of my arm."

"Well, he didn't let go; last night he said that you practically ripped his arm off."

"If I had ripped his arm off, he would not have had been able to put it around my shoulder."

"Yeah. About that…" Top Hat laughed. "McGrady hates you, but last night…and that scene just a few moments ago? They kinda add up to something."

"Yes, they do add up."

Someone new came into the dining scene just then, and he was looking for a place to sit. He considered the cliques that he'd encountered over the past few days, but he wasn't that close to them, that he'd be able to eat with them.

He then saw Connor, most unusually being flanked by four accompanying breakfasters, and thought, _Why not?_ So he grabbed an issued plate of pancakes and the necessary fork and knife, and then moved to that table.

"Morning, ma'am," he said to Connor.

"Good morning. And don't call me that. Military honorifics are dangerous on any battlefield, and I don't have a rank."

"Sorry, uh, Connor."

"McAnders!" Cayman said. "Welcome to Connor's table."

"Yeah, I noticed," said McAnders. "Not to be rude, Connor, but y'all never showed yourself to be a woman of company."

"They sat at my table," Connor explained. "I don't mind."

"Most of us thought you were introverted or somethin' of the sort."

Connor's eyes flickered, and widened slightly. "I appeared introverted?"

"Well," McAnders said as he scratched his head. "Yeah. Always seated alone, never speaking 'less spoken to; hard not to get branded as a shy one there."

"I see," Connor said, somehow looking affected by what he'd said. That was pretty blunt of McAnders, and the others knew it:

"Ted!" Cayman snapped at McAnders. "What the hell?"

"Hey, she asked."

"Yes, I did ask," Connor agreed. "Thank you for explaining."

"Don't, uh, mention it, I guess."

Connor was silent for a minute. Her head was tilted downwards, and her eyes lay on her pancakes like they were the most interesting things in the world. Her fork was in her hand, but it remained stationary on the table; it didn't move, twitch, or even involuntarily shudder. In fact, _she _was so still that she might've not been blinking at all. O'Reilly had this urge to prod her.

"Sorry," she finally said – and smiled widely – that was rare! – as she shook her head.

"What was it?" O'Reilly asked.

"I didn't know that I appeared reclusive and shy."

"Ah. Right."

"Hey Connor," Cayman popped in. "Why weren't you at the party last night, anyway?"

"I was sleepy. It takes a lot of effort to kill a T-1." This was exactly the same sentence she gave to O'Reilly, in response to a question in the same spirit.

"Yeah, I guess so."

"I would've gone, though," Connor added. "If everyone's going to get themselves incapacitated with ethanol, then there's no harm in joining them. I wouldn't drink."

"Do you ever get drunk?" Top Hat asked, a twinkle in his eyes.

"No. My alcohol tolerance is very high."

"Just how high is 'very high', Connor?"

"Very high. I can drink as much as Mel Gibson and release comparatively few anti-Semitic remarks." The men at the table laughed as she did. O'Reilly laughed too, of course, but with a little bit of confusion in mind; suddenly, the _cold_, tough-as-nuclear-nails leader was all light and preppy. Triggered by "Ted" McAnders's comment, maybe? She'd said that she didn't know that she had looked introverted over the past few days, but really – who'd give off such an impression _unintentionally _without really being just that? It just struck him as a change that was somewhat abrupt and weird, but a change that was probably going to be good for morale nonetheless, and her men's respect and relationship with her.

The latter changes, concerning Cameron and the warriors of humanity, were seen almost immediately. A small group of men, now cognizant of feminine laughter interspersed with the loud ruckus of male amusement, changed their seats too and joined Cameron Connor and the table of people that included an incomplete set of T-1 slayers. They joined in the new path of conversation that implicated everything from pancakes to the PlayStation 4 (fall 2011 release date pushed back indefinitely due to nuclear war), and in this it was like a View-Master changing slides from a gloomy, dull landscape to a scene from _Saturday Night Live_ as Connor was suddenly participating in their lives in a light-hearted way that didn't involve the salvation of the human race. And it wasn't just that, either; just like back in school, the men had all separated into their various cliques, as those who knew each other would stick to themselves, while keeping away from other groups. This mentality of localized collectivism had carried over even to last night's "Last Party." But when Connor tethered their interest to her table, everyone was somehow given an opportunity to interact with one another, crossing groups over with groups and breaking down psychosocial walls. Hell, she wasn't even saying much of anything particularly _funny_ – she was just being open and happy and a good listener.

This unexpectedly unifying effect could be attributed to just how _warm_ she was being. Before, she was as solid as a brass sculpture in an Alaskan winter. Now, more than just thawing her old disposition, she was as effervescent as the blue fish played by a lesbian comedian from an old CG movie about a missing clownfish. Thankfully she didn't share this aforementioned character's memory loss issues.

Maybe it was also because Cameron Connor was the only woman all around, and was a very_ hot_ one at that. Countless men have been inspired to new, bubbly heights because of pretty women, and recent years have seen the rise of the beautiful, strong and intelligent Amazon Queen archetype as an attractive figure – and Connor damn well embodied this archetype.

Whichever the reason or combination thereof, it was working out well, and Connor's table was full of rowdy boys/men by 9:00 am. Most had finished up their pancakes, and were now telling jokes, stories, and discussing post-Apocalyptic life in general. Many of these laughers had lost huge chunks of family and friends to the nuclear strikes and Skynet's henchbots, and it was a wonder that they had any good or light emotions left in them to be drawn out – but Connor did it.

It was after some further sharing and such that Connor noticed that the newcomer Reese brothers still sat alone at their lonely table. They'd been long done with their food and seemed to have been staring blankly for the whole time they'd been sitting there. The elder Reese, Derek, was as pensive as she'd been in her pancake-staring interval, while Kyle played with his fork, striking with deadly force at ants or errant crumbs.

"I'll be back," Connor said in a mockingly gruff voice, as she left her table. The men converged around the space she left behind, and resumed their chatter without her. She moved to the Reese brothers' table and sat a few meters away from both of them.

"Hello," she said, since she hadn't even caught their attention when she sat down.

"Wha…" Derek snapped immediately out of his trance-like mode of thought. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said as he stood up quickly, but Connor motioned for him to get back to his seat. "Is there anything you need…uh, sir, ma'am?"

Connor smiled at the young boy. "No. And you call me Cameron, too. I'm probably not much older than you are."

"Okay." Derek looked back down at his plate.

"How old are you boys?"

"I'm sixteen. My brother, Kyle here, is nine."

"And you're from Los Angeles."

"Yes."

"How did you get here?"

Derek began to look uneasy at his seat on that question; he fidgeted on the bench and tapped on his plate a few times. When he finally spoke, it was with a discernibly shaky voice: "We were part of a convoy, L.A. survivors, everyone going to Cheyenne Mountain. We had six cars and a military jeep. Then the planes came, and the tanks too, and almost everyone was killed."

"Who lived?"

"Kyle and I hid. There was a motel nearby, and we ran to the cellar while everyone fought. When we got back out, everything was gone, and there was only one man left. We had thirty people before the attack.

"Our man was wounded but he could move. He found us a car and drove us the rest of the way to Colorado. Before we got to Colorado Springs, he said that he couldn't go anymore, and he passed out and died. Kyle and I walked here from that point."

"Where are your parents?"

Derek looked at Kyle. Something passed between them, a glance that offered more information than simple speech could disseminate. He turned back to Connor. "When I brought Kyle to the underground, our parents were downtown. That's where the missile hit."

"I'm sorry," Connor said, frowning and looking genuinely saddened by the account. A single tear rolled down Derek's cheek. She understood that he didn't want to talk about it, and pursued the question no further.

"Miss Connor?" the younger Kyle asked then.

"Yes, Kyle?" She moved closer to the boy.

"While we were back in the tunnels, I asked who was hitting us. No one knew. Do you know?"

"An advanced networked distributed artificial intelligence established control over secure governmental intranets and the global internet, gained access to nuclear-capable launch facilities, and declared war on humankind, resulting in nuclear strikes at critical military locations and regions of high population density across the planet."

Kyle blinked. Connor understood why.

"A crazy computer reached out and launched missiles at places all over the world," she explained.

"Oh," he said. "I get it now." Connor's simplification was efficient enough. "Are we going to fight it?"

Connor looked earnestly at the young boy. "I'm going to fight it, so that you and your brother won't have to." She patted his head and stood up from the table. Looking around, she spied the original large group of men still being chatty and loud, and stepped out the dining hall's metal doors without being noticed, making a path back to her room in the living quarters.

* * *

Why hadn't she gone to the party, really? It wasn't like she _could_ sleep.

Well, Cameron had spent most of the previous afternoon and night with a soldering iron, a pair of pliers, and a sharp cutter. Sitting on her bed, a long steel table in front of her, she'd peeled away pieces of her skin to reveal blackened capacitors and their corresponding twitch servos, representing the damage caused by using them in ways that went beyond the specifications. Each servo and its partnered capacitor was designed for at most six "twitches" per minute, and even this was pushing it. The problem lay in Connor having used them at a rate of six twitches per second, as the number of 25mm bullets that was coming at her per second was…immense, to say the least. Hey, don't blame Alternate Future Skynet for bad design – future plasma weapons were semi-automatic at best.

She'd pulled out capacitors that were damaged, separating repairable units from totally destroyed ones, and had gone straight to work on them with (obviously) inhuman steadiness. She had also been very quiet, such that people stopping by her door would simply think her asleep and move on.

At 5:30 am of the next day, interrupting her self-repair, Cameron had thought to make breakfast. Over the days following the Fateful Eleventh, each man had been the steward of his own stomach, and snacks and supplies were shared and distributed whenever someone arrived and had them. Until today, not a decent, full meal had offered itself to the seventy of Cheyenne. Cameron, from her experience, figured that good food was a good idea for morale, and she made pancakes to this effect.

Now, as she sat on her bed back in her room, Cameron pondered the changeover of her outward personality.

As she had understood him, John Connor was a great man to whose actions the men and women of the Alternate Resistance had looked up. He was brave, skilled and had a great tactical mind, and was ruthless in his dealings with the machine.

He also resembled the machine. He was aloof, and spoke to no one but his generals – and even these men participated in no colloquy with Connor, outside of orders and reprimands. While he was ruthless in his dealings with the machine, perhaps he could be considered even _more_ ruthless with his subordinates; at least, when he shot up Skynet's bots and blew them to pieces, it wasn't like they were _dying_. Meanwhile on the home front, the slightest mistake led to a stripping of command or rations (or both), and large but otherwise forgivable mistakes would lead to summary execution by abandonment in the wastelands.

Who would die for such a man? To this there was an answer that encompassed a group larger than it should have been. Indeed, this very distant reclusive nature of Connor fortunately made him something of a legend among the people of the Resistance, and there were many who would fight under his banner, live by his decrees, and die for him, because they thought he was a glorious hero who lifted the spirits of his men in battle. Paradoxically, it was this very thought that lifted their spirits, and not Connor himself, because most of the time, his presence was neither inspiring nor empowering. It was such that ironically, only those who truly _knew _Connor were those who would _not_ die for him.

Cameron had been given the opportunity to replace John and thus had decided to build on the errors she saw in his reflection. And because of this, it was much to the emulated surprise and distaste of her machine consciousness, that she had been branded as shy and reclusive – exactly the image that she did _not_ want to project. At the same time, though, it was a chance for a re-evaluation of the self, and in this regard, Sarah Connor's statement so many years ago was mirrored:

"You know what I love about you guys? Even when you've evolved into the ultimate indestructible killing machines, you're not above self-examination and improvement."

It was sarcastic, and was actually intended to berate the socially and verbally inept Terminator, but nothing could be truer about the robot girl from the future – especially now that this self-examination and improvement would possibly be beneficial to the movement towards the salvation of mankind.

Cameron, thus knowledgeable of the error in her "disposition," immediately switched to a new parametric set of interaction rules. Smile more, talk more, gather as much information as you can about others, leave no one behind, talk to everyone, and say things that make them happy; these were a few of the little, shallow precepts that, in aggregate, apparently brought many heretofore-discrete "cliques" together into a unified entity, and drew the members thereof closer to her. And it worked, so that was good.

It was still 9:30 am as Cameron returned to her mundane procedures of self-repair, and barring all further boring description, she was done by 11:00 am. Now, she needed to test if these things worked well when interplayed with her regular motors.

Her room was way too small for what she was going to do, so after she got into a new set of clothes, picking up one of her bags, she left the long hall with living quarters at each end, and made her way to one of the two physical fitness centers that populated Cheyenne Mountain.

Inside the center was all manner of exercise equipment – seated row weight machines, bench press assemblies, and, of course, the ever-popular treadmills. What Cameron was looking for, however, was the wide open space that the place offered. And in the aerobics room was to be found the best-designed space for the job; a wide floor composed of wooden floorboards, and floor-to-ceiling mirrors lining the walls provided exactly what she needed.

Now, exactly what kind of motor test involved a place like this?

Cameron first stood at the center of the room, perfectly still, bag in hand and unblinking in her forward stare. And then she spoke softly, in an extreme monotone that was worse than any emotionlessness that John Connor had ever perceived from her: "Starting self-diagnostic procedures. Dumping all debug data to logs and speech synthesis for secondary and tertiary memory access." She made herself speak all her self-commands aloud so that she'd have at least three sources of memory access now. It was a technique that helped in retrieval later on.

"Engaging forward kinematics engine and loading restraints for standard human skeleton." Cameron's motions were normally governed by an_ inverse_ kinematics software engine, which moved her body parts to target locations, using logical calculations that were based on the obvious restraints of her endoskeleton. By loading her _forward_ kinematics engine, she switched to animating herself using precalculated routines. Why, though?

She was holding her bag. Reaching into it, she pulled out a CD, and turned its data surface to her eyes. She eyed it, turning and tilting the disc very slowly over time, until she spoke again: "Loading Red Book audio CD standard. Decoding 2-channel, 16-bit PCM audio sampled at 44.100 KHz. Reading subchannels R and S to load CD-text. Playing song internally: _Nocturne in C#-Minor_; Frédéric Chopin."

And she shed her shoes, leaving her barefoot on the wooden floor. She held herself on her toes.

And danced.

Danced with such grace as to make a man forget the end of the world.

Bending down at her torso slightly, she drew a leg forward and raised herself up again. She lifted her arms and brought her hands together over her head, each sweeping motion a visual cornucopia of elegance. No one could have been more detached from this exercise of refinement than the Terminator who now danced to unheard music, but no one either could have been so perfect in the dynamics of the dance; so flawless was she in her execution and so fluid in her movement, and so graceful in so human a pattern. It was a sharp irony that the monotonous, robotic beginning of this effort had led to so beautiful an affair of art and transition.

She began to turn herself on the balls of her feet, slowly at first as though in a placid warm-up stage. Then she stopped, her legs crossed at the onset, and suddenly whipped herself around in a single, smooth circuit, her arms spread horizontally as though embracing her image in the mirror before her – an image she projected of quiet magnificence and glorious beauty, a personification of resplendence. And truly enough, while not human, she was a _person_ indeed, and one worthy of this image.

As she executed the workings of this dance, a memory long-gone arose in her head through the music and the debug data – another memory of dancing. It portrayed an entirely different sort of dancing than the solo traffic of her arms and legs, but it stemmed from dancing nonetheless and perhaps was thus summoned by her memory registry. Forward kinematics required little CPU power on her part, as did the decoding of PCM audio, so she welcomed this memory as a guest to the motional poetry of her body, and in the machinery of her mind, played a happy scene from happier times…

* * *

There was much to be said about prom night.

For one, the buffet table was loaded with, of all things, Japanese food. Not a single ounce of more Western delicacies was laid on the white tables with white tablecloths, and white cards were labeled with such obscurities as "Katsudon" and "Teriyaki" (or, as the _hiragana_ characters below the Latin characters described, カツ丼 and てりやき respectively).

Another was that the event took place in the school gymnasium. This was a fairly common occurrence, actually, but there had been bad feelings about the gym as a venue because in general, it was not very pretty. And then, some genius team of improvisational decorators darkened the room, added a retro disco ball, placed blue cellophane over the fluorescent light tubes, added paper and fabric drapes everywhere, and got good deals on good tables and chairs – and somehow the place ended up looked better than any private school's cookie-cutter hotel ballroom prom.

John Connor – whoops, John _Baum_ – was sitting at one of the good tables, eating good Japanese food, as this list of "much to be said" reeled through his brain like a spool of film. There was a lot more on the list, and not all were as light or neutral as the previously mentioned thoughts. Indeed, John sat alone, for the reason that one of the things on this list of "much to be said" included the absence of Cheri Westin, whose mysteriously stringent father had forbidden her to go to high school's social gathering of social gatherings. So…he had no date. That was okay, right? "Going stag" wasn't such a bad thing; you got to talk to all your stag friends, party like at a bachelor party despite not really getting married any time soon, and make fun of the lovingly mushy couples.

Well, damn it, John didn't like partying much, and it didn't help that he didn't have that many friends in school yet. On top of that, he _wanted_ to be among those lovingly mushy couples – and indeed, _everyone_ actually did, but hid their desires behind a mask of mockery. Oh sure, maybe the commitment-frightened weren't members of this demographic, but they were a select few and even some of them had thoughts of the other side from time to time.

Was it mentioned that he didn't have that many friends? He probably had only _one_ – and that friend was going to date his "sister." Morris! Yes, Morris! Lacking some social graces and alternative in a sense – that sense being rather alternative-_human_ – but he was a good guy, and was actually a decent person. He'd take care of John's "sister," all right; he had a genuinely shy crush on the girl and didn't really seem to be _capable_ of having designs on her outside of a simple ask-out like that. Then again, in this case it really wasn't his "sister's" safety that was important in this sort of gathering, but rather _Morris's_.

Because his "sister," Cameron, was a freakin' Terminator.

She was a hot one, though. And she happened to project this image of being a wickedly gothic-looking, dry-humor type of girl, with massive intelligence to boot. And despite all the little mechanisms associated with the Terminator line, she was _different._ Somehow she could be affectionate at times; somehow she could act so damn _human_ sometimes that it was unnerving to think about.

And sometimes he caught himself thinking that he could love her.

Every time. Every fucking time that she pulled another one of those Humanity moments, he became curious about her in a significantly inappropriate way. And every time she pulled off something that _directly affected him_, he…well, he got confused. He'd hugged her; she'd hugged him back and smiled. She'd cried; even if it had been a simple test of emotions, he'd comforted her.

She was always such an enigma, and it bothered him enough that even if he could almost love her as a person, sometimes he wanted to be away from her because of all the mixed feelings that she stirred up in him.

And in the end, barring all the reckonings of personality and concepts on artificial sentience, the organic sheath of her coltan endoskeleton was really pretty.

She wasn't there yet. John had gone ahead because his mother had a claim on the robot for "a mission of unspecified parameters," in Cameron's words. He sat there alone at his table, looking quite happy despite being a little sad at his lack of a date, and ate his beef bowl _gyudon_ in peace.

At that point, Morris appeared and sat next to him.

"Hey, bro," he said in a very light and excited tone. Morris had gotten a good haircut and a tux for the occasion – kudos for effort. "Your sister ain't here yet?"

"Nope," he said. "She had…uh, something to do first with our mom."

"Oh, all right."

"Hey, nice suit."

"Hah! Thanks!" He beamed and pulled the fabric of his coat forward. "I think it looks ridiculous, I swear to God…but if it works, then to hell with what I think, right?" He laughed.

"Yeah…"

"You're a stag?"

John sighed. Not again; it was what, the fifth time that he was asked that question today? Jesus. "Yes, I'm a stag. Cheri wasn't allowed."

"Westin?" Morris frowned. "Warned ya to stay away from that one," he said. "Nothing good to come out of a thing for her." He shook his head. Morris wasn't really trying to scare John off or diss on Cheri; he really just knew the stories, and wanted to watch out for his friend.

"I could say the same thing about my sister, Morris," John snorted.

"What, Cameron? She seems nice."

"You don't know Cameron." It was John's turn to laugh. Damn right Morris didn't know her.

His laughing was interrupted by some kind of uniform commotion through the chatter of the gym – primarily among the guys. Some of them had stopped talking to their partners and had turned to where many were now looking; others had their eyes wide and their mouths agape. Neither John nor Morris could see what was going on, but they saw that many were now looking towards the entrance of the gym. Then, the questioning voices of some disbelieving guys told them all they needed to know:

"Holy shit, is that Baum's sister?"

"Christ, that _is _her! What's her name…Cameron?"

"That can't be fucking her. I know she's pretty but she never looked like that-"

"That's Cameron Baum!"

At that, John stood up and peered through the crowd, trying to see why everyone was so hyped up about his sister's appearance. At school, the near-constant scowl on her face and the narrow, piercing eyes that she wore ruined the natural beauty that she possessed, so that people didn't spend much time thinking about how pretty she was, or could be. At home, her face wasn't much different, but at least he saw her more "relaxed" at times, when she wasn't in protective scanning mode or whatever it was that she entered whenever she ventured outside with John.

But this wasn't _any_ Cameron that he'd ever seen before. This Cameron had her hair curled, and some delicately applied makeup to accentuate the tones of her skin, and wore a lovely, flowing black dress that emphasized the luscious curvature of her body, and held herself high and not stiffly as John had been so accustomed to seeing her. And this Cameron, over all of the other sundry things that enhanced her beauty – this Cameron smiled beautifully. She smiled as she entered through the doors of the gym, smiled at each man who paid his respects and admiration to her in full, and smiled at John and Morris as she made her way to them.

She was positively radiant, _glowing_, and the most attractive person in the whole room now. Her appearance brought to mind a musing of Rushdie's in _Fury_, where he described a character patterned after his own wife:

"Extreme physical beauty draws all available light toward itself, becomes a shining beacon in an otherwise darkened world. Why would one peer into the encircling gloom when one could look at this kindly flame? Why talk, eat, sleep, work when such effulgence was on display? Why do anything but look, for the rest of one's paltry life? _Lumen de lumine_."

She was a burning effigy of transcendental resplendence; if at this very moment, beauty could be quantified, then its value would be _one – _no one could look at any other woman and see anything of note that had not already been overwhelmed and washed away by the torrential floods of Cameron's body. She was alone in her class, and raised the bar of loveliness to such a height that the closest competitor was comparatively plain.

A curious guy from the back of the room had also come to observe the commotion, and bore witness to the blinding brilliance that illuminated the prom. With no second thoughts, he pulled out his camera phone and, coming in close, took a nice close-up shot of Cameron. Thanking her for letting him do this – and silently thanking the Almighty One that such radiance was allowed to exist – he returned to his seat and uploaded the picture to the Internet; he would later post it under this URL:

i195.photobucket(dotcom)/albums/z157/Flatterland/PromeronBaum.jpg

There were the requisite questions, "Is she with anyone? Does she have a date? Where is she going?" and these were answered when she made her way through the gym towards the table to which John and Morris had returned.

"Hi," she said, beaming at Morris.

"H-hi," he said in a crisp staccato of a reply.

"I am sorry I'm late. I had something to do first."

"It's…okay, really. Oh!" He stood up and pulled out a chair for her, which she took and for which she thanked him. "I'll go get you guys some drinks, okay? Stay there!" He dashed off for the buffet table.

Cameron turned to John, who was still looking at her. "Is something wrong?" Her smile dropped off for a moment.

"Oh, nothing," John replied. "You look really good."

"Thank you."

"I'm guessing that this is the 'mission of unspecified parameters,' then."

She nodded. "I asked mom to help me get ready for prom. She wasn't very happy about it but decided to help me, for your sake. She got me this dress and took me to a stylist."

"Did she teach you how to smile?"

"No, she only told me to do it more often. I know how to smile." She demonstrated this knowledge to John, which made him melt a little.

"Very good," he said, turning away; her face burned his eyes.

"Hey guys," Morris said, panting as he ran back with the drinks in his hands. He placed one of each at Cameron's place, then at John's, and finally at his own. "Wow, Cameron, you look amazing tonight."

"Thank you," she said again.

"No, thank _you_," Morris replied.

There wasn't much time for idle chat before the music began and the dance floor started filling up. "Hey, do you, uh, wanna go dance?" Morris asked his date.

"Okay." She stood up to go over to him, as he led her by her hand to the floor.

John looked on with no small amount of snickering. This wasn't the partnered slow dance; rave music blasted out the speakers and people were showing off their stuff on the floor like it was a crack party. The source of John's laughter therefore was the fact that Morris _definitely_ couldn't dance, and Cameron seemed to be doing very, very well.

He couldn't help but feel a tinge of green envy among his emotions as he regarded the couple. Indeed, besides saving the world – and even this was starting to be tipped lower in the scale – there was nothing he would have wanted more, than to go into this intimate event hand-in-hand with…oh well, hand-in-hand with his "sister." As Hamlet said, _"Ay, there's the rub_._" _She was supposed to be his goddamn sister. Why couldn't she have been a family friend, or a girlfriend who spent time at the house? It wouldn't have made a goddamn difference…

Okay, it probably would have. If something went wrong, who'd be her mother when the school called? Some shit like that made _sister_ a reasonable choice, but still!

In the middle of John's musings, the rave music stopped. Cameron and Morris returned to John during the lull of a few minutes between songs. They were laughing. Cameron about Morris, and Morris about himself.

The DJ's voice rang out like some omnipotent deity's address to the world: "All right, ladies and gentlemen, grab your partner and take it slow on the floor. We're having our slow dance's song choice from the 90's, and this one's a pretty good number for the affair."

A short piano intro set the stage for the voice of Sarah McLachlan, as her serene song _Angel _filled the perceptions of every prom-goer.

"_Spend all your time waiting for that second chance…"_

John heard the lyrics, and interpreted them a little differently from the original meaning; right now, he _had_ that fucking second chance, and he was _the_ supreme idiot if he didn't take it.

"Morris, could I have this dance with my sister?"

"Sure, bro." He smiled at Cameron, who walked with John to the dance floor.

John put his right arm around the small of Cameron's back, and took her right hand in his left, as she reciprocated with her free arm. She felt so delicate in his grasp, so strangely _fragile_, that his touch was soft and light, even though he knew very well what it was that lay beneath her skin.

"All right," John said, and began to move with her to the music. Their steps were in sync and their motions were smooth. John kept his eyes locked to Cameron's as they flowed about the floor as one, and he sometimes drew her closer with his arm as the song progressed.

McLachlan's soothing vocals washed over John's being as her skilled fingers played both a physical piano and a metaphor of that instrument in his heart. Her chorus bled into his soul as he gently led Cameron on a slow dance.

"_In the arms of an angel, fly away from here…"_

Sarah McLachlan had written _Angel_ based on the death of the Smashing Pumpkins' keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin, but John didn't know that and saw something else, strangely appropriate in the words that came from the speaker's throat. He _was _in the arms of an angel – a coltan angel, but an angel nonetheless – and in her embrace, he was able to fly away from all terrestrial perils and concerns, and instead find infinite solace in a comparatively infinitesimal period.

"_From this dark, cold hotel room and the endlessness that you fear…"_

Was it so much of a stretch to conceive verisimilitude between his life and, quote, a "dark cold hotel room?" It was a dark life of running and fear and hatred, and it was cold, devoid of emotion and a warm home, a solid state in life, He also feared the endlessness of war and pain, the way the days always flew by so fast but he never felt any closer to stopping the nuclear rain – or being in the midst of it all, his flesh being seared before vaporization a breath's passing later. And there again, before him, filling his vision, heart and spirit, was the angel who was taking him away from it all.

"_You are pulled from the wreckage of your silent reverie…"_

And yet, John's dreams were never silent. Never had he been able to coax his brain into a _silent reverie_, for inevitably some psychological Terminator would bash through the walls of his mind and strangle his form until it was his _screams_ that were silent. And there would be shattering; buildings, hearts, relationships and _bodies_. The wreckage was everywhere; he saw it everywhere - the debris of human flesh and blood, of lost battles, and crashed friendships and ruined plans and lost loves and everything else that became the detritus of life.

So it was appropriate, then, that Cameron was this angel, because when he was with her, he forgot.

"_You're in the arms of the angel. May you find some comfort here."_

He danced with her through the rest of the song, drawing closer to her each time they moved. When McLachlan's last word passed, he was fully embracing her, her head rested on his shoulder, the two in such a warm embrace as was reserved for the closest and most passionate of lovers.

The song died down, and for a timeless interval, John and Cameron were immersed in pristine quietude, simply in each other's arms. There was no Skynet. There was no war. There was no mission, and John was not a savior-to-be, and Cameron was not a cybernetic protector; John was just an ordinary boy, Cameron an ordinary girl, and they were holding each other in extraordinary love.

The rave music started pounding, and the timeless interval was out of time. John smiled shyly at Cameron, who smiled with no other characteristic than that of a standard smile. He led her back to Morris, who was quite eager for more time with his date.

"Thanks, Morris," John said.

"No problem. Hey, you guys were good out there."

"Yeah. Weren't we, Cameron?" He laughed, masking all the tension he had built up within him with an overenthusiastic guffaw.

"Yes, we were," Cameron said, nodding. "Thank you, John."

"For what?"

"For dancing with me."

"Oh, sure. Thanks for dancing with me too."

"Let's go!" Morris jumped from his seat, taking Cameron's hand. "We've got a boatload of partying to do. See you later, John."

"Yeah. See you guys later." They left him alone at his table.

So fucking confused.

* * *

"Wow," rang a voice from behind Cameron. Immediately, she stood up still, closed the memory, and turned to face the source of the speech. It was O'Reilly. Again.

"Still a ballerina after all those years, huh?"

"Yes. I still practice sometimes." She closed the dancing animations and reverted to inverse kinematics. It was 2:56. Testing on her twitch servos combined with normal movement was finished more than an hour ago. She really just liked dancing.

"You're pretty good."

"Thank you." She began packing her stuff into her bag. "Are you here to exercise?"

"No, I'm here for you. One of the dorm people said that he saw you going to the gym."

"Oh. Okay. Why?"

"We have special guests at the front door. Some of your scientists are here."

* * *

Connor went to greet each one of the seven incoming scientists as she gathered them in the main control room. The soldiers who'd escorted them waited at the corridors outside.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. I'm Cameron Connor, and I was head of the research team at DARPA's Cyber Research Systems division in charge of designing and implementing the Skynet AI platform and related weapons. Our purpose here is to research on efficient methods of defeating Skynet, predict its future movements and plans, and commit to new technologies on which DARPA was working prior to Skynet's takeover.

"I'm going to be supervising all R&D at this base, and we'll be coordinating with other teams in the region as soon as we establish a secure and reliable form of communication with them. I am working on that.

"For now, rest. We'll be clearing out some of the buildings in Cheyenne Mountain to serve as our labs and fabrication facilities later on."

She left them quickly, without even having given them a chance to introduce themselves or their fields of expertise. But she did leave an impression of being straight-to-the-point…and she_ was _one of them anyway. That was what mattered. And since Connor was going to be a military leader of the whole deal on top of her science background and supervision in the research, things would actually come into place this time, unlike all the lost hours previously spent rotting in labs while orders and scientific achievements trickled down the monolithic bureaucratic chain of the military.

Now was a time for necessity, though. Maybe, under Connor's direction, mankind would get plasma rifles in the next month.

Someone had cooked fried chicken for lunch. Actually, it was many people simultaneously working at the kitchen. Lots of chicken there; the freezer had been practically raided by the cooks.

So it was that when Connor went to the dining hall, it was possible for her to address almost the entire population of Cheyenne Mountain, eating fried chicken.

"I'm going to be working on some projects for an unspecified amount of time," she announced. "And therefore my presence may not always be possible. In my absence, whenever it occurs, the eleven generals that I've assigned will take over command. Follow their orders as you do mine."

And she added: "Movie night tonight. We're watching _Serenity_."

The place erupted into applause and whooping.

* * *

Cameron traveled the path back to her room very quickly, and she found herself longing to return to "daydreaming." She found that the retrieval of that memory of prom night had unexpectedly caused the synthesis of "happiness," and most profoundly so when she remembered that John wanted to dance with her. Back then, she was mostly cold to the idea, and artificial in her smile, but now that she returned to it, she experienced, for the first time, a happy feeling triggered by a happy _thought_. The emulation program that she designed was not supposed to do this – could it have been evolving?

Whatever the case, it seemed to have been imperative for her to return quickly to similar thoughts after having been interrupted during her _silent reverie_ by O'Reilly. She wanted to see John's face in her mind again; not quite _needed_, but desired, in order that her emotions be fulfilled. It was an inexplicable Auxiliary Objective that defined this, and it had come from some mystical recess of her mind that even she was unaware of. Things of the sort had been happening lately, following John's death, and the expansion of her consciousness and being had come geometrically.

Before she dove into another memory long gone, though, she stopped herself, and cleared her thoughts manually, using a main memory dump. There wasn't any time for this right now; right now was the time for action, and not thought. And if there were thoughts to be had, they'd be about creating new technology for the Resistance. The scientists were there as helpers, sure, and in this job they'd do a fair job. But in terms of actual research and development, they were just there for show; she'd be doing all the "research" and "development" in that game. She knew everything about the future, after all. It was in those goddamn limitless memory banks.

So it came to pass that the heart of the savior was today removed from the top of the list of priorities, and replaced with the mind of the savior.

* * *

**Author**: **So this chapter is done! Didja like it?**

**The Heart of the Savior does not actually directly showcase Cameron's compassion and "heart," so to speak, but sets the stage for her possessing this compassion and closeness to her men later on. This is intended to be an irony; Cameron, the machine who struggles to be human, becomes warmer and nicer than the previous savior, the machine-like John Connor. **

**You'll note that this is among the first few stages of Cameron's personality development. For this I decided to start her off with "artificiality by necessity." She needs to _act_ nice so that people around her will _perceive_ her as nice. They'll grow to like her and become more inclined to stick with her, and understand her when she gives orders. This is how her authority evolves.**

**The theme of this chapter is, in fact, artificial humanization. The above shows Cameron acting human. She then dances with such perfect human grace, but is simply using an animation engine that she shares with many of today's video games. In the prom flashback scene, Cameron does nothing especially human; she is just prettied up by a stylist, and told to smile more often by Sarah Connor. It's meant to emphasize the artificiality beneath Cameron's outward appeal, so that when she starts acting human by her own accord - as is referenced by the last part, where she starts to long for John - it will be a nicer surprise.**

**Note how O'Reilly mirrors John/Cameron at times. This is an important bit...**

**Thanks for reading to this point, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing it! Please review as you leave the room... :D:D:D**


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